Xbox X Gaming: Starfield

Bethesda Software and Xbox were hyping this game up big time; it was being compared to Hello Game’s “No Man’s Sky” touted as being better than this game.

I decided to get it before it was due to show up on Game Pass. It goes live for those of us who purchased the game and, okay, I’m liking how it looks on my 60″ UHD TV; not all that crazy about how the characters I’m interacting with look like… mannequins but, okay, it’s not that big of a deal. The game is quest-driven but you can go “off-script” and just explore stuff on your own but I’m not really liking how it threw multiple quests at me; I’m not happy with the multiple items being presented when I speak to someone; as far as the ship I “inherited” goes, the piloting interface wasn’t what I expect from such a game and, okay, land the ship, hold the “X” button and… a cut scene and somewhat disappointed that this is taken out of my hands – but I can do it playing “No Man’s Sky” and even in “Elite Dangerous – Odyssey” so the game gets some red check marks in this aspect.

I’m not happy with how the game handles inventory; I understand that there’s a lot of stuff to be collected – like mining stuff on planets and other items that may or may not be significant in the game and at some point – and you do need to collect stuff to do crafting and upgrades but there’s only so much you can carry on you; it’ll slow you down and when you’re on a planet and in your suit, running – which is something you might have do when the NPCs start shooting at you – drains your suit’s environmentals and, okay, the “realism” of this makes sense but when the character with you starts busting your ass about carrying too much junk, sure, you can pass it off to them to carry and that whole process is confusing and even more so when trying to transfer “junk” to the ship’s storage area.

I’m at the point in things where I’m wondering what’s so fucking great about this game but, okay, it’s on me to figure this out and I haven’t yet because I’m stuck in a loop: My current quest sent me off to take out some fighters and fighting the ship is… not as “easy” as it might appear to be and I think it’s because they assigned the engine thrust to the left joystick and moving the ship to the right joystick which doesn’t allow you to move the ship in three dimensions – and like I can do in NMS and ED. I’m getting blown up like it’s nobody’s business; the HUD is “screaming” at me that enemy missiles have locked on and I can’t evade them because I can only move in two dimensions or up, down, left, right – but no pitch or yaw and, nope, can’t break the missile lock, can only get the shields to repair themselves once and… this is pissing me off and, yeah, I now understand that my “stock ship” is totally inadequate for this quest – but I can’t get away from it and like I can in the other games mentioned so I can build my ship up so that it will be adequate for battles.

I’m… not happy with this game at this point. I’m not going to let it defeat me but, overall – and, again, at this point in things, the game is not living up to the hype. I’m probably going to have to start a new game to be able to get out of the loops of getting my ass blown up and that, all by itself, isn’t making me happy but these… inadequacies are going to make me play the game in a way other than how I originally started.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress…

 

Steam Gaming: Steam Deck Update

What’s been going on with my plunge into gaming with Valve’s Steam Deck?

Why, I’m glad you asked! I’m looking forward to playing a Ratchet and Clank game that isn’t on a PlayStation, which should be good to go in a little while. I’ve found, purchased, and played some familiar games, like Elite Dangerous with the Odyssey DLC but I’m having a tiny bit of trouble figuring a couple of things out with the controls – they don’t quite behave like they do with my Xbox controller, but I’ll figure it out.

The biggest thing I’ve seen that’s not to my liking is that the Steam Deck gets pretty hot after, oh, maybe twenty minutes of playing and is prone to locking up or going through a series of shutting down and rebooting, which I’m finding a bit strange since it has a fan; to compare, I’m almost always doing something on my iPad and if it gets hot, I never notice it and likewise for my Samsung Pro tablet, neither of which have an internal fan.

I added a 1TB SD card to it – and to my lady’s Steam Deck and after she inexplicably ran out of space loading the games she wanted to play. I’m a bit surprised at the open SD slot itself – I’m used to devices with a covered SD card slot that makes it easy to get at the slot and can keep dirt and stuff out – and it just trips me out having to install one because I have big fingers, those cards are real tiny, and because I keep my fingernails short, installing the card into the Deck got interesting.

Stuck it in and getting it formatted was pretty easy and fast – but now I had a question: How to install games on the SD card? Well, after installing the SD card in my lady’s Deck and picked an uninstalled game to install, yay – it gave me a choice of where to install the game! Question answered! Let the gaming begin!

The overheating thing is going to be a problem for me since, when I get to playing a game, I’m at it for hours on end so if this thing is going to get hot, lock up, shut down and reboot in a loop, well, you pay your money, you take your chances, which will likely result in me not taking it with me on the road as well as its battery… can’t hang with me. As you might recall, I was playing “No Man’s Sky” and I had the Deck unplugged and after about twenty minutes of playing, the Deck alerted me that the battery was low and, what the fuck?

Which is, in a way, hilarious because with my iPhone and iPad, I can leave them unplugged for hours and beat and bang on them without a problem – and these devices have been notorious for their shitty battery performance… but my Steam Deck’s battery seems to be suffering from diarrhea.

The graphics are top-notch; there are a lot of games that are way cheaper than the $59.99 or $69.99 I’m used to seeing in the Xbox store – but that’s why I have Ultimate GamePass so I can play a lot of games – and for as long as I want or until it goes away – for $14.99. I’m not suggesting that Valve get into something like this but I do like that they have a lot of games under $20.00, you know, if they can get me interested in playing them.

I’m gonna have to spend some time prowling the Steam store to get a better feel of what games they have to offer and… I’ll let y’all know how things are going with the Steam Deck.

 

Steam Gaming: Valve’s Steam Deck

I remember getting Sony’s PSP portable for gaming and it was cool to be able to play games without being tied down to my PS2 console.

Portables have come a long way since the PSP came on the scene and the latest thing is Valve’s Steam Deck. I’ve been seeing and reading things about it since it first came out but I was happy with my Xbox consoles and the PS3 I had but since then, well, my lady wanted something portable to play games on (even though I got her an Xbox Series X console); we looked at the Nintendo Switch which, to me, came in “too many flavors” and, worse, didn’t have any games she was interested in playing.

And games that Steam has and when we said, “Okay, let’s see what this Steam thing is all about.” I wound up getting her a Steam Deck – and let me tell you how much of a pain in the ass that was because when I went to pay for it, the Steam website not only rejected my card but triggered an alert from my bank asking me if I had made this payment. Once I said, “Yeah, it was me!” paying for her Steam Deck went through without a problem although I’ll admit to fucking up: She had picked out the games she wanted and I paid for them and only later finding out that… they were now my games.

Shit. She had to get the games again and once she created her Steam account but the good thing was that they didn’t cost that much. I ordered my own Steam Deck a few days later and, yep, went through the same shit I experienced buying her device – and then again when I found familiar games – and games that I have on my Xbox – available on Steam and I had to go through some shit with Valve/Steam to prove that, yes, I’m the one trying to pay for this stuff and stop telling me that my bank is the one rejecting it because I know that if they have a question about a purchase I’m making, I’ll immediately get a text from them asking, “You da one paying for dis?”

But now I have to figure out how it works because I know she’s going to have a gazillion questions that I’m gonna need the answers to. I kinda screwed up because I didn’t get her the unit with the most available space because she doesn’t play games like I do so I wound up getting both of us 1TB SD cards so that she now has room to download all of her games… and I have space available for the games I’m sure I’ll be dowloading.

So. The Steam Deck ain’t little and like the old PSP was. It has a good-sized screen and the familiar joysticks, D-pad, and the A, B, X, and Y buttons that my Xbox controllers have. It also has two sets of “levers” on the underside of the unit that, at first, I didn’t know were there (and because I hadn’t bothered to look at the underside of it) but, okay, they’re probably needed for some games and like the two pads that I’m not sure, at this moment, what they’re for and what they do – but I did find that I can sometimes move a cursor with them.

This thing is kinda heavy but that makes sense – I think. It gets hot, too, and I appreciate that it has fans in it to keep it cool but I have to be careful about how I set it down because I’ll wind up blocking the bottom vent and it’ll heat up until I pick it up again and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to hold it when I’m not playing a game.

Its menu system took me a few to figure out but that was to be expected but I found out the other day that if I’m installing a game that required me to type in some information, um, okay, why doesn’t the keyboard automatically show up? Found that I have to click a button that has three dots on it to bring up a menu so I can select the keyboard which is kind of a pain in the ass – but I’ll get used to it and it’s something I know I’m gonna have to show my lady, too.

I started out playing a game that, when I had a PlayStation, I loved playing: God of War. It’s also the game that made me not like games that have puzzles in them and this version of it is no different – but that’s not the point of things but what is the point is how the Steam Deck’s battery… sucks. I was playing God of War with it unplugged and I got a message saying that the battery was low – and I’d only been playing for maybe an hour and in that time, the battery went from 94% to 4%! Okay, not only is that not cool but explains why the deck came with a bag for its power cord.

The case for the Steam Deck is nice but even my lady wanted to know why there isn’t room inside for the power cord; it’s better to lug around one thing than it is to lug around two things in this case. It downloads games rather quickly, which is a good thing; it’s not like when I download a game on my Xbox and how I wind up starting the download and walking away from it because despite being connected to our high-speed internet connection, the vaunted Xbox Series X takes its own sweet time downloading stuff.

I saw that it has a place to plug in a headset and… it’s Bluetooth enabled, which is cool since I have Bluetooth earbuds and a Bluetooth headset – and a plug-in headset for my Xbox and it just might work on the Steam Deck, too. So far, I haven’t experienced any lagging when playing games although I was in the middle of playing God of War and the whole deck locked up on me and I had a bitch of a time powering it off since, again, the whole thing shot itself in the head.

Is it worth the $500+ plus that I paid for it? Eh, yeah, so far it is but the jury remains out as far as a final verdict is concerned. Right now, I’m playing No Man’s Sky, a game I’ve been playing on my Xbox for a few years now and… it’s not different at all playing it on the Steam Deck.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

 

Xbox One Gaming: Deliver Us Mars

Twitter had been getting blown up about this game coming out and I was interested in playing it; I was like, “Cool… it’s Mars!”

I got the game and… I regret having paid for it. Graphically, the game is nice although I didn’t like the faces of the characters at all; the controls weren’t bad until I had to use dual ice climbing tools to navigate a wall of ice and it was clumsy for me and took a bunch of times falling off the ice sheet before I got somewhat comfortable with it.

Two things that made me not like this game: Cutscenes and puzzles. This game has way too many cutscenes that, after a while, only serve to confuse the storyline and one that I felt could be better. By the time I actually got to crash land on Mars, I was sick and tired of the cutscenes. During the actual launch into space, sheesh, I kept getting “nagged” by the game to perform things because I had to keep looking for whatever the hell I was supposed to do; you hover over an area and you see an “X” in the general area but, okay, I did my part to get us off the ground which, for me, was one of the coolest parts of the game.

It was cool going outside the ship to first fix one engine and then to remove it; where I was supposed to cut were nicely marked but using the laser… lacked precision movement. In other games and where I encounter such issues, I’d go into the controls and adjust the sensitivity of the controller’s thumbsticks but you can’t do this in this game and that kinda pissed me off. I had the same problem when the ship was approaching Mars – I had stuff to do and because it wasn’t clear what I was supposed to do – outside of my sister/mission commander yelling at me to hurry up (the bitch), I wound up destroying the ship several times before I got it right, well, not really; I finally abandoned the ship and my sister got trapped and, well, the ship blew up, killed my sister and I crashed on Mars.

Before this happened, there is a cutscene where I’m diving with my father and checking out a wrecked space station and I was supposed to survey the wreckage and, I realized, find some stuff but I’d swept the area for a damned long time trying to figure out what else I was supposed to be looking for and, oh, maybe almost an hour later, I stumbled across the last thing to be found and the cutscene finally ended and I was miffed that I couldn’t just exit it and continue.

Doing the numerous puzzles in the game drove me crazy right from the start. It’s not like I can’t figure them out but they’re a pain in the ass and more so when, in this game, there are a ton of them, most of them involving lining up a “power beam” to activate doors and other things and they went from “easy” to “what the fuck” at some point; some of them were quite complicated and the worst of them was finding hologram recordings left behind by an apparently dead crew and have to decrypt it using my drone-like companion and having to move around all over the place to slot three pieces properly to activate the hologram and if I thought that the power beam puzzles were annoying, having to do these was even worse since, when you first see one of these, the game doesn’t give you a single hint about what you’re supposed to do and I only noticed it while flying around the damned thing and saw one part get slotted and turn blue – and thinking that maybe it should have turned green but that’s me.

There were parts of the game that were so frustrating that I just stopped playing. It’s hard for me to get into a game that spends more time pissing me off than it’s allowing me to (a) follow the story and (b) just play the game. I’m currently stuck in a part of the game where I was leaving the station after confirming that no one was alive; I’m on my way out, I get to a busted elevator and all I have to do is jump down the way I got up to where I was but the busted elevator moves and dumps me underwater and after going through some shit trying to cut moving fan blades that kept pushing me away and then made it hard for me to stay put long enough to cut the fan blades, I wound up in a cavern with the now familiar ice patches and, okay, fuck, I got more climbing to do but, wait – the first wall doesn’t go up very far and the next wall is behind me and I’ll have to jump across a pretty wide gap to this wall and slam my ice climbing picks in at the same time and… it’s not working because either my character jumps and just falls to the ground (and takes some injury) or she jumps in the wrong direction and, what the fuck.

I’m not happy. I get it into my head that maybe I missed something, so I restart this part of the story and hustle through all the stuff I’d already done and, yeah, did not even mess with those fucking holographic puzzles this time. When I get to the part where I’m leaving, I suspect that I will not be able to cleanly jump down so I can go out the way I came in and, yep, I jumped and still landed on the elevator and, shit, after almost drowning a couple of times, wound up back at the place that I cannot figure out how to get out of. Well, that’s not correct – I know where I’m supposed to go; what I can’t manage to do is to get the damned character from one side to the other and I’m thinking that the game’s physics engine is “fucking with me” because my character falls like she’s on Earth and not Mars, which has more gravity than the Moon does but not to the point where if you jump and fall, you drop like a lead weight and as you would here on Earth. Compare this to when I’m running around outside and you can see the gravitational differences as she runs and jumps but when she had to climb and fell off, Earth-like gravity.

It pisses me off that I can’t figure out how to get this hussy from one side to the other. I’d already died once because my oxygen ran out (but that makes sense given how she’s exerting a lot of energy and breathing hard trying to make this goddamned jump) and after spending like twenty minutes trying to get this done, I just gave up and, at this point, I’m not likely to go back to it. I didn’t pay a lot for this game and that’s the only good thing I can take away from it at this point. Controller stuff isn’t great; the cutscenes are more annoying than informative because they keep flashing back to before my hard-headed character left Earth for the Moon and then more cutscenes about some shit that happened there and, to me, this is a piss-poor way to tell a story because you spend more time watching cutscenes and doing puzzles than you do anything else.

I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. The concept of the game – going to Mars to figure out where the people went – is a good one and I was looking forward to being on Mars and dealing with being there but, yeah, cutscenes, puzzles, and an ice climbing thing that unless I figure it out, seems to be impossible to accomplish at this point in things. I even broke down and read the walkthrough for the game, thinking that it would give me some kind of hint about how to make this jump but all it says is… climb out. Well, duh, I’d love to be able to climb out of there if you gave me a little hint about how to make this jump but since there’s no mention of this, well, fuck you – the hard-headed heifer is going to be stuck there and “die” just like the colonists she’s looking for obviously did.

Okay, check this out. Elite Dangerous is a hard game to learn how to play. The controls alone take some doing to get the hang of and especially when approaching orbitals and you get it in your head to not let the auto-docking function land your ship safely. Yeah, I wound up having to manually fly the ship when my auto-docking function mysteriously failed for no apparent reason and, well, it’s not as easy as it looks but I had fun laughing at myself trying to figure it out; I was running the risk of seriously damaging my ship and pissing off the orbital authorities whose solution to “troublemakers” is to blow them up. Things like landing at a planetary installation gets seriously interesting because if you’re not paying attention to the information about its gravity, it might suck to be you and I made that rookie mistake and flew into the planet and damned near blew myself up. Or that one time when I misjudged my distance to target and overshot the facility and flew into the ground. Only pure luck was involved in not destroying my ship.

Oh, and there are no puzzles in this game at all. You have to learn how to fly your ship from place to place as well as learn how to fight your ship but once you get the hang of things, it’s stuff that I don’t have to think about doing – but I’m not even trying to manually dock with an orbital or planetary facility. Been there, done that, let’s not and say I did, and nope, not doing it again unless auto-dock mysteriously fails again. I mean, shit, just figuring out how to deorbit my ship to be able to fly to a planetary installation wasn’t as easy as it might have looked and even being a more experienced player, I don’t always get it right – but whatever physics engine Frontier used for the game sure as fuck gets it pretty damned right for this situation.

Elite Dangerous is a “walk in the park” compared to dealing with Deliver Us Mars. If I’m constantly asking myself, “How the fuck am I supposed to do this?”, well, that’s a problem; if I have to find a game’s walkthrough to get answers, well, that’s a problem for me and not being able to figure it out and especially if the game in question isn’t going to give you a “hint” about something but if said walkthrough just says, “Just do it…”, well, that’s a problem and isn’t all that helpful. What I found interesting about the walkthrough is that it does tell you how to solve the power-beam puzzles… but doesn’t tell me how to make this bitch jump across a rather wide gap and she can’t jump worth shit which the science nerd in me says “makes sense” given that she’s being affected by the wrong planetary gravity.

I have to remember, when I fire up my Xbox Series X, to go to the store and give this game the shittiest review I can think of. I might see if there’s a better walkthrough that’ll actually explain how to make this jump across the gap. Maybe. My review will still be highly unfavorable because I shouldn’t have to resort to going to a walkthrough to be able to do this.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Tiny Tina and High on Life

So I “broke down” and finally got myself an Xbox Series X console and an extra terabyte of storage and I’m not regretting buying it because, as Microsoft advertised, the difference in the graphics has been “startling” in most of my games and like I wasn’t really “seeing” them before.

I also broke down and bought Tiny Tina’s Wonderland (and all the extra stuff offered) but I wasn’t going to buy it even though the game was being seriously hyped on Twitter and what few preview clips being offered just didn’t wow me. For those who may not know, Tiny Tina is a Borderlands character, and she appears in a few of the games and she is, as one game described her, “Nuttier than squirrel shit.” Tina is the Bunker Master for the game, “Bunkers and Badasses” and it’s set in… medieval times and I play the role of the “Fatemaster” and get to go through a lot of shit so that I can defeat the Dragon Lord and in “typical” Borderlands’ style.

I didn’t think that I’d like the game but let’s say that I’m not jumping for joy over it and the one real shortcoming in the game is that you can only level your character up to Level 40. Once you defeat the Dragon Lord, there’s no playthrough and like the other Borderlands games has but I hope that Gearbox decides to add this at some point. One of the key things about playing any Borderlands game is… legendary weapons and this game is quite bereft of them – but I’m spoiled because the other games were updated to drop legendaries like flies on shit and to the point where in other games, I actually roll my eyes to get a stockpile of legendaries and more so when I have most of them already and rarely run across one that I don’t have.

And also typical for a Borderlands game, you have to do more with less. I had a rough time figuring out the Wards (aka shields) and the other enhancements still kinda confuse me because I often have to stop what I’m doing to look at which character attributes I’m playing with and more so when you can level up and add a second character attribute. It’s a good thing that I long ago adopted the habit of wiping out all of the bad guys before checking out the loot. And it’s kinda rare to say, have a decent Ward and find one that’s better and buying stuff from one of the four available machines is (a) sometimes confusing and (b) not better than the item you already have – and that includes the “Item of the Day.”

Still, it’s Borderlands. I get to kill shit. The game is better than I thought it would be but it could be better. As I also tend to do, I’m playing with all the characters available and just like when I play the other games, I keep finding stuff that I didn’t find, see, or even know about when playing it the very first time – then feeling kinda silly because I’m finding stuff that I just walked past the first time. Because I have three Xbox profiles, I am, of course, playing on all three of them… because why not? I try to take what I’ve learned from my primary profile and apply it to the other profiles and, often, with mixed results but, for me, that’s what makes playing a game like this fun.

Now the other game, “High on Life.” Xbox announced this game “a long time ago” and allowed GamePass subscribers to preload the game and… made us wait until a couple of days ago to download the rest of the game and play it. One of the highlights of this game are the weapons that… talk to you and, really, do all the talking for your character. I was telling one of my granddaughters, who I’ve been playing other games with, that I have never heard so much cursing in a game like I’m hearing in this one – and it’s not just the various characters you can run into. There’s this one weapon that cussed me out right after I acquired it! While the controls were rather intuitive, the “bad part” was loading the game and… trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing which, in this case, I was looking for a famous bounty hunter and I roamed around the “starting area” for a good forty-five minutes before the game told me that the bounty hunter I was looking for was on a bench. Wait, what? I mean, one of the reasons I had a hard time finding him was that I didn’t know what he looked like and – wait for it – it took a good part of that forty-five minutes before I happened to look up and there’s his ugly mug on a huge billboard.

Oh. But what bench is this motherfucker on? I know that before the bench was mentioned, I saw every bench in the area and at least five or six times but, okay, I’m running around and rechecking all the benches and, yep, there he is, camped out on a bench like a homeless person – and a bench I know I checked before.

SMH.

Once I find him and get outfitted to do some bounty hunting, I’m off and running to different places, facing a lot of dastardly enemies while on the hunt for loot chests so I can stab them with the knife I acquired and a knife that… has issues. I decided that the knife isn’t just bloodthirsty, it’s a homicidal sociopath, too. I know that when I play such shooting games, I enjoy the killing, but this knife makes me look like I don’t like killing shit. When I kill the character for which the bounty is on, the knife goes to work to acquire the now-dead bad guy’s DNA and I can understand why the game doesn’t show what the knife is doing but my “vision” gets blurry with all the blood and gore the knife is producing.

I’ve spend some time standing in a place and asking myself, “Where am I supposed to be going?” or “How the hell am I supposed to get up there?” and other such things. The game has a pitiful radar and its scanner is more than pitiful because while it will let you know what direction your objective is, I’ve found myself turning in circles while triggering the scanner and not seeing shit or I’ll see it and it doesn’t “stay put,” which makes me move and scan and… it sucks.

Despite these things, I really got into playing it because these deficiencies were challenging to work through. You don’t get much in the way of “loot” from killing characters and not all of them will drop something that’ll recharge your shield and/or health and just as I learned playing “Journey to a Strange Planet,” I wind up dying. A lot. And “stupidly” most of the time. Like, in the early parts of the game, there’s not the expected “double jump” that a lot of games have – and the game tells you that there is one but, nope, there isn’t one so I spent a lot of time dying while trying to jump to the places I had to be until I finally was able to buy the jetpack and, well, that suffices for the double jump but it’s seriously limited in duration and how high you can go and having it run out of fuel while trying to reach a place resulted in me dying. A lot.

SMH. The game has one segment where there’s the one thing I can’t stand in a game: Puzzles. A couple of them had me just standing in place trying to make sense of it. But I figured them out just the same. The one part that gave me the most trouble was trying slow down time so that I could slow down an aircar enough for me to jump on it and, from there, to the platform I needed to be on. Timing it was a bitch and, yep, died a few times and being cussed out by the weapon I’d just gotten that does the slowing down of time. By the time I got it figured out, shit, I must’ve died five or six times and not because I missed the jump: A couple of times, the slowing down effect “wore off” before I could make the jump and the aircar just sped away from under me.

I made it but, damn. This game really makes you work for it. It’s fun. It’s delightfully raunchy and to the point where if I had young children, I wouldn’t allow them to play this game or be around when I’m playing it because I wouldn’t want them asking me, “Dad, what’s a bagful of dicks and why was she helping him to get them in his mouth?” Or seeing the battle with the final boss and in order to kill it, I had to stuff a bomb… way up its ass. Twice. The dialog in the game alone makes this an adult kind of game despite the “cartoony” nature of things.

I’d gone into the store to see if there was anything I could buy but didn’t see anything and the “kid” running the store told me to get the fuck out since I wasn’t buying anything. I had a great urge to shoot him in the face – and couldn’t.

If you like Borderlands, yeah, I’d recommend Tiny Tina’s Wonderland and despite my difficulties with High on Life, if you can get it, do so and give it a try – and I hope you do better at it than I did.

I almost forgot the one thing in TTW that still drives me nuts: Actually being in the Wonderlands. Why? Because you can’t look around in the Wonderlands. There’s a bit of a targeting problem in the game and I find myself moving around a whole lot trying to find the thingy that says “hit X” so I can open a chest or interact with one of the characters. For me, it’s annoying because I’m running to places and I can’t see where I’m going and there are spots when a bad guy will appear and if you don’t kill it with a punch fast enough, it’ll grab you and now you have a battle on your hands. Normally, I’d not say that this is a problem, but the problem is trying to turn your character in the right direction before you get snatched into a fight.

And these “side fights” are intense. Last night, I was going after an item I needed and the battle to get it was so intense that it took me almost twenty minutes of fighting – and almost dying – before I won and could get the item I needed. I was getting seriously swarmed by the “sub-bad guys” that I couldn’t keep my attention on the boss I had to kill – and one that kept hitting me with its “transfusion” weapon that stole energy from me to increase its own triple level of energy. It was so bad that I had to put it on pause for a moment to get the kinks out of my hands and fingers, drink some water, eat a piece of chocolate, and right back to the fight.

Oh, and when you’re going for the piece that I needed, if you die, you have to start over from the beginning and make it through all of the fights again. Good thing I like killing shit.

When Microsoft announced the Series X, they said it was going to be a beast… and they weren’t lying.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Watch That Next Step!

I’ve been in another of those gaming funks where I’m not playing one game “exclusively”, but I’ve played all of the active games I have and it’s like being “bored” but not really but lemme tell you about what I was thinking about and experiencing while playing Minecraft.

I’m not afraid of heights. Where am I going with this? Stay with me. Way back in the day, I’m on my Xbox 360 and I see a demo for a game called Crackdown. Okay, it’s free so let’s check it out but I didn’t have a lot of hope for it because some game demos back then were just shitty. I download it and get to playing it and, holy shit: This game is fucking amazing! I was hyped! I called my son-in-law and told him about it and that he had to download the demo. He did – and I can tell by the way he said that he would that he was just humoring me but he calls me back maybe an hour later and he’s as hyped about this game as I am and now neither of us can wait for the full game to come out.

It does and I’m having a grand time running around this open world game, killing bad guys, sometimes having to deal with the police because I “accidently” shot or blew up an innocent bystander or nine or fifteen. Since we could play the game together – pretty much unheard of at the time – we’d wreak havoc in the game and on each other – he loved to sneak up on me and shoot me or blow me up and thought it was funny until I’d get my revenge. One day, we’re doing something crazy. The game has a lot of ways to collect achievements, from racing games to jumping vehicles through targets that can be found in a lot of places.

Some of those are easy while others are like, “How the fuck do they expect me to get that one?” But my son-in-law figured it out: Spawn a vehicle and drive to one of these targets and pick up the car and throw the car – and me – through the target. Genius. We’re laughing our asses off as we’re taking turns chucking each other at and through the various targets and often with hilarious results when he asks, “Dad, did you get the Agency achievement?”

The Agency is the headquarters for the crimefighters, and I tell him that I didn’t know of any achievements in there; he tells me that you can get an achievement by climbing the Agency building to the very top… and jumping off – but don’t die. It’s the tallest building in the game but I tell him that I didn’t know about it so I hadn’t done it and, well, who cares?

He says, “I did it.”

I’m competitive. So was he. Those three words and the snarky tone they were delivered with had me thinking, “Oh, it’s on, motherfucker!” because there is no fucking way in that I’m not going to do something he’s bragging about having already done! Indeed, we’d been taking turns one-upping each other in the game but in this, he didn’t as much throw down the gauntlet than he had punched me in the face with it and, oh, fuck no, I can’t let him clown me like that!

All I had to do was figure out how to do it. It took me almost two weeks to accomplish this because of two things. One, I had to work and the other was me discovering that my character wasn’t powerful enough to make some of the jumps which meant having to run around the city looking for the powerup orbs so that I could reach the places I needed to and, um, dealing with falling off the building in places, dying, and having to start the climb all over again. What I had noticed in one attempt was I was up really high on the building and I looked down… and do you know that feeling you get in your guts when you’re up high and look down and it makes you think, “Oh, shit – what the fuck am I doing up here!”?

Well, I had that feeling and it was weird because I know that I’m sitting on the sofa in my living room with my feet on the fucking floor but I am… afraid of being up this high in a damned video game! Let’s not talk about experiencing that feeling of falling; one time, I’m like three-quarters up the building and I misjudged a jump and I fell off the building and as I’m watching the ground approaching, I’ve got that “I’m falling” feeling in my body… but I’m not really falling, of course. This weirded me out big time and was about to think that maybe there’s something wrong with me but my son-in-law had mentioned the exact same sensations when playing the game and messing around on the tall buildings.

What the fuck? Man, talk about being immersed in a game? I finally make it to the very top of the Agency building; I’m standing on the tip of the tallest spire and looking out over the city as a master of all I survey and I look down because I have to jump in a way that’ll land me in some water way down there – and I learned that I had to hit the water to get the achievement because I’d jumped off the building and from the wrong place – and I had a great urge to run to the bathroom – and missed the water, died, and didn’t get the fucking achievement. Back up the building – but now, I’ve mastered climbing this motherfucker. I look down to aim my jump and… vertigo. That sinking feeling in my stomach because my mind is telling me that I have no fucking business being up here but, again, I’m sitting on the sofa.

And now, I’m afraid to jump off of the building’s highest spire. I actually put the controller down and walked around to calm myself before going back to the game, saying “Fuck it!” to myself, and jumped off the building… and I wanted to jump out of my skin as my character dropped like a rock and… into the water.

Achievement achieved. I tell my son-in-law that I got it and he was telling me how afraid he was when he’d done it and… he’s not afraid of heights, either. This game fucked with both of us in ways that, honestly, I never thought was possible and no matter how many times I’d been up way high in the game, that feeling would always show up and I’d just ignore it and tell my mind that, no, we’re 100% safe and not in any danger.

So, last night, I started a new world – the forty-eighth one this year, by the way – and digging my usual mineshaft and as I always do every time I start a new world. Ever since Mojang – the creators of Minecraft – gave us the Cliffs and Caves update, I learned that you have to be careful when digging because you can’t know that if you take out a block there might not be another one beneath it and, yeah, found that out the hard way when I’d took out a block but it was kinda dark in that corner, I stepped down and… dropped like a lead weight – and feeling that sensation of falling – and the only reason I didn’t fall to my death was I landed in some water.

What the fucking fuck? So I learned to look before taking another step while digging a mineshaft. I’m doing this and removed the last block and… there’s a black hole under that block and I thought, “Okay, here we go with this again…” I put a torch on the wall in front of me so I can see how far down this goes and… I get that damned feeling of being up “too high” and something I hadn’t felt in years! I shake it off and change the setting from Survival to Creative and, yes, I know that Minecraft purists (like my daughter) would give me some shit about “cheating” like this but as I say, this is my game and I’ll play it any damned way I want to. While playing with my grandson and one of his friends, I learned what has to be the coolest trick I’d ever seen in Minecraft: Making an elevator out of bamboo scaffolding.

Normally and when you wanted to, say, get to the bottom of a ravine, you had to have a bucket of water on hand, make a waterfall, then ride down it and hope that you don’t drown before you get to the bottom. It’s a technique that I employed when discovering all of the amazing caves that can be found in the game but the scaffold elevator trick literally blew my mind and I have no shame in changing over to Creative, grabbing a block of scaffold, and creating an elevator so I can have a nice, smooth and relatively safe trip to the bottom… because I did learn what happens if you move from where you have to stand in order to make the elevator trick work and, yeah, sometimes, it’s a very long way to that sudden stop at the end.

And having to ignore that sensation of falling. So, after dropping an “oh shit” amount of scaffold blocks, I step on the top of the last block placed, hit the “A” button and one express elevator, going straight down! I get to the bottom and now it’s exploring time… and dealing with another disturbing feeling that only Minecraft seems to give me. I’m roaming around and dropping torches to light up the place but doing it in a way that will allow me to get back to the place where I started my exploration and feeling scared of getting lost and not being able to find my way back.

I’m feeling this and laughing to myself as I remember the many times my now late son-in-law would go exploring and getting lost because he refused to adopt my “way” of marking an area, which is placing torches on the left so that, on the way out, they’re on the right and if you’re on your way out and there’s a torch on your left, you’re going the wrong way. But, as I said, this dude was as competitive and hard-headed like no one else I’ve ever known, and I’d spend a lot of time laughing my ass off at him for getting lost in his own mine or cavern and laughing even more because I knew he couldn’t stand me laughing at him for this.

But here I am in yet another magnificent cavern and feeling afraid of getting lost and thinking about Crackdown and how… irrational this fear is since if I do fuck up and get lost – and I have done that a few times (but not as much as my son-in-law made it a habit of doing) – well, I’m in Creative mode and I can fly and it’s a no-brainer to fly straight up and dig my way to the surface. Duh. I’m not lost, though, and I usually don’t get lost because I have a good sense of direction, or I always know where I am relative to where I started… but I still put down torches in my way just in case. I know I can get back to where I started… but that fear of getting lost is fucking with me just the same, which got me thinking about being “afraid of heights and falling” in Crackdown. It gets better. I have Crackdown 3 and, yeah, it’s got some stupidly tall buildings and other structures that have to be climbed and, yeah, that feeling of not wanting to be up that high and let’s not fall but, sure, I’ve climbed to the top of these things, done what I’ve had to do, and have jumped right off the top of them but that sensation of falling is still there.

Weird shit. It doesn’t happen in any of the other games I play, like, I can jump off a cliff in Borderlands and not get that sense of “fear” being up high or falling even though it’s rare that you fall out of bounds in the game and wind up dying – and I’ve done that, said, “Oops!” and kept right on playing. I have yet to figure out how and why these two games… fuck with me like this. I’d had a summer job working on a construction site and tasked to work on the top floor of a pretty tall building and being up that high – and sometimes, going to the edge of the unfinished floor and looking down at the “ants” going about their business didn’t bother me one bit. I’m just not afraid of heights… except when I’m playing these two games.

And I’ll be damned if I know why other than to say that game designers are really good at making you feel like you’re in the game and not “just playing” it. I left the cavern to empty my inventory, which was full of the coal and iron I desperately needed and, yeah, I know that I can switch back to Creative and make all of this stuff but I don’t do that; it just feels… fairer to collect this stuff without being in Creative and, yeah, that’s just me. I’m back in the cavern and finding out that this bitch is deeper than I thought it was. I’m flying around the place, placing torches and putting scaffold elevators in and I’m doing this not so much for myself but for when someone else, like my grandson, comes into my world and wants to explore the cavern and now they can get down there without having to worry about getting killed and losing all of their stuff – and then having to hustle back to get it.

And something in the back of my mind is telling me to turn around and go back before I fuck around and get lost. I get to the very bottom of this cavern and look around to see that there are lot of places that are still cloaked in darkness which means I have a lot of work to do to light things up and thinking about doing it and making sure I don’t get lost… and, fuck, I don’t know why this is “bothering” me since I obviously know that I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room. Duh.

It’s just weird. I’m not concerned about it, mind you, but, yeah, it’s just weird.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Bioshock 1 and 2

I’ve been playing the remastered versions of these games and I remember when they first came out for Xbox 360… and how it frustrated the shit out of me.

I couldn’t figure out how to play the game; the pamphlet that came with the disc wasn’t helpful at all and I remember tossing my controller aside in frustration and disgust just a few minutes into playing the game. My son-in-law had had a good time laughing his ass off at me and telling me that he was playing it and how much he liked it and how easy it was.

Bullshit! Then I got the second game… and realized that it didn’t make sense because I hadn’t even gotten into playing the first game. I had set both of them aside to play other games and when I traded in my 360 for my first Xbox One, I also traded both games in, too… and forgot about them.

Until, one day, I was in the store and looking for something new and different to play… and saw the remastered games, including the third one which I had owned… and didn’t like because it was really not like the first two games at all. Both were $9.99 and I said, “What the hell – lemme get them again and really play them this time!”

Bioshock is a “weird game.” It’s dark and gritty. Set in an underworld city that’s seen better days and filled with a lot of corpses and people who’d gone batshit crazy after being hooked on a series of differing “plasmids” that not only gave them amazing abilities but, yeah, made them lose their minds, too. As I got into playing Bioshock 1, man, because I hadn’t played the game before, everything was a surprise for me. It’s an FPS – first person shooter – and it was… easier to play since I’d gotten used to playing this type of game playing Borderlands. I don’t know how many times I got killed but, eh, you learn to expect this. Being able to acquire weapons and my own set of “plasmids” so I could do battle with the crazies took some getting used to. Being worried about running out of cash to buy stuff and ammunition with and, yeah, running low on “Eve,” which powers the various plasmids to be found and used.

Getting deep into which weapon would work in a certain situation and being able to quickly switch weapons when the one I thought would work wasn’t working… and then doing that without getting killed in the process. One of the things the game calls for is for the player to either rescue a “Little Sister” for her ADAM… or to harvest it from her. Rescuing her frees here from the effects of the ADAM she’s been collecting and consuming… and harvesting it from her kills her.

You get more ADAM when you harvest it, and you need all you can get. But first, you have to defeat the Big Daddy that is protecting her, and they are no joke. I would defeat one – and, sometimes, after he killed the shit out of me – and if I had to harvest her ADAM – because I needed it to update my stuff or get new stuff – I felt… bad about having to kill her. Silly, huh? I’ve played the game twice and I got an achievement (which I didn’t really care about) for going through the whole game without harvesting a Little Girl the first time around.

In a time where a lot of games are all about multiplaying with other users – and even across the many platforms now out there – both Bioshocks are about you against this murky, gritter, underwater city while being taunted and hunted by, in the first game, the guy who built it and, in the second, by some ditzy chick who had taken it over and, I guess, after I killed not one but two guys who wanted the city all to themselves… and me dead. While part of the end game for Bioshock 1 is for you to become a Big Daddy – which is well into the game – Bioshock 2 starts you out as a Big Daddy and as I played it, I realized that, yeah, if you don’t play the first game, just playing the second one doesn’t makes sense as far as the story line goes and because Bioshock 2 is a continuance of Bioshock 1 – you’ve just changed characters.

I’d played both the first time and it was worth what I’d paid for them. I’m done with them and looking at my other games and trying to decide which of them I wanted to play… and went back to play both of them again and as is my habit, trying to play them better than I did the first time. And I did. And not so much. Discovering a lot of stuff the second time that I hadn’t been aware of the first time. I’ve played both games three times now… and all three times have been different. And since I have three Xbox profiles, yeah, I get to play them on my other profiles, and you’d think that I’d have them down pat…

And you’d be wrong about that. The many times I screwed up and said to myself, “You know better! You knew what was coming!” And still fucked it up in some way. Incredible. I’m having fun playing a very old game and, yeah, I’m wondering why I got frustrated when I tried to play it so many years ago. When I finish writing this, I’m going to finish the games I have in progress; I’ve found that because both are set in an underwater world, it… gets to me. Gives me that closed-in feeling that, I think, speaks to how well the game designers did their job because I’m playing the game and feeling… wet. Damp and moldy. I’m not just playing the game – I’m in the game.

Maybe I’ll buy the third game again and give it a serious try. I remember playing it and it was… confusing but it didn’t really hold my interest because, as I said, it’s nothing like the first two games and it’s more aboveground than being anywhere near the water. I dunno. What I do know is how silly I feel not being able to play the first game when it came out.

But I’m making up for that!

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft – The Supersized Building

The other day I wrote about my project to double the size of a building I had created and the work I had to look forward to and especially making a mountain go away. The good news is that the supersized building has been built… and it is amazing.

It looks the same as all the normal-sized ones do… just way bigger. I’d had a problem lighting it up until I realized, duh, this one is twice the size of the others so making it all nice and bright inside wasn’t going to happen and I still don’t know how I’m going to do with without cluttering things up… and I might not even try to bring more light to it… because it looks amazing being lit up as much as it is.

It has a cathedral-like look to it. My daughter had dropped in to see it and noticed that between the way I have the ceiling designed and the lighting, the ceiling looks just like Starfleet’s insignia and I hadn’t noticed this until she mentioned it but the moment she did, I also realized that the normal-sized buildings “didn’t have this look” because I can easily light them up so that there are no shadows anywhere.

Hmm. Still, the work to build it was harder than I thought it would be in that it took much longer to build the ceiling and, sometimes, it got to be so repetitive that it actually had me nodding out a few times. Creating the floor’s pattern was… a bitch. I’ve made it a point that when I build one of these to make sure that no two floors are the same and, really, to make every floor unique and this one really had me talking and cussing to myself because of the sheer size of it and then, once I had the “feel” of it, making sure that I didn’t screw it up… which I almost did a few times. Normally and once I get one side of the floor created, it’s easy to fly back and forth to make sure I’m duplicating the pattern faithfully and accurately… but this building is twice the size and jetting back and forth just “complicated” things and so much that when I finally got it finished, I found that I’d missed putting in some blocks here and there – and when my daughter visited, she found a few more I had missed.

But that wasn’t the bad part… and this part of it was pretty bad. No – that would be sticking to my original plan to make that mountain go away. I’d “take a break” from the monotony of working on the actual building to work on the mountain that was blocking the view from the building’s windows… and I was regretting the decision to make it all go away. I did try using TNT and in the hope that it would make this very boring and monotonous task easier but, nope – all that did was make more of a mess than anything else so I spend a lot of near mindless hours whittling away at it, one row of blocks at a time.

I am happy to report that it’s all gone. In whittling it all down, I even found the “entrance” to an underwater cavern that I’m now thinking about what I’ll have to do to it so it can be explored in Survival mode and without drowning in the process. It was hidden under the mountain and had I not removed it, I wouldn’t have known it was there. Still, there were moments during its removal that I just wanted to stop fucking with it; on top of building the supersized version of my building, it was too much. Not only did I have to remove all the dirt and other stuff, there was also a lot of trees that had to be removed and some of them were those damned double oak trees that, if you don’t get all of the blocks of wood out of them, the tree won’t go away until you find and get rid of them

I do not like the double oak trees one bit. Those who play Minecraft knows that once you chop down a tree, the leaves can drop stuff like sticks, apples, and saplings of the tree that got chopped down and I did my best to collect as much of those things as I could and store them in a couple of chests I had stashed in another but close-by location… because I might “make my daughter happy” and replant all of the saplings I’ve collected. Maybe. I love my daughter… but I might not love her that much as far as this project goes.

The building is done. The mountain is gone. I still have work to do. I still have to create rooms that players who may visit can call their home base as they explore things. I have to start and finish the landscaping that I do for every building. So as to not spoil the beauty of the building’s interior, I’ve opted to create rooms in the center section of the building by digging into – and down – the sides of the center section, something I’ve done before but this time it’s different.

I usually create a “stairwell” in the center of the building so that the floor’s pattern flows from one side to the other but for this build, well, I did that… but not as deep as I’d normally do it – it’s only three levels deep which (1) makes the floor’s pattern flow amazingly but (2) creates a bit of a problem creating side rooms because the “ground” is the “ceiling” so there’s grass above and that’s just not going to cut it. I was “running out of gas” after having removed the last huge chunks of the mountain so I only got as far as creating the entryway to the space where I am figuring out how to create the number of rooms I have in mind… and with the understanding that I can’t see what I’m doing.

Normally, I would build these rooms aboveground and I can see what I’m doing and all that; building them underground isn’t going to be easy but it’s on my list of things to do and, officially, the building won’t be “certified for occupation” until I get them built and outfitted to my liking.

Why go through all of this? It’s… therapy. Kinda. I have to remember how to build the damned things; I have to think about where I’m building it and not just on the surface but under it, too. I have to make myself “stick to the plan” at all times and not take shortcuts or let stuff like huge, mountain-like hills/structures stop me from the building. If it’s in my way, it’s got to go. It’s about focus. Attention to detail. Just putting my head down and doing all that has to be done so that the build gets completed the way I always want them to be.

It keeps my mind active. It takes my mind off of the neuropathic pain I continue to have to deal with and especially in my right hand. It makes me “sit still” and not be fidgeting all over the place and like I normally tend to do. As much as building one of these “gets on my last good nerve,” it is… calming and relaxing which, during this build, had my heart rate coasting along in the low 70s.

The supersized project isn’t at 100% but it has been… interesting. I am telling myself that I’m not going to build another one of this size and that’s just me bullshitting myself because I probably will because I do have fun doing it and, yeah, it’s therapy for me. I’m going to try to get some pics of it so I can show it to you and especially what I did with the floor this time around.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft

Those of you who Minecraft might understand what I’m about to say and those of you who don’t, well, you might be able to relate to this because there are some things in life that can happen in the way I’m about to speak to.

So… there’s a building that I created and took from a simple structure – and it wasn’t what I had wanted to build in the first place – to something that whenever I build one, I have a “hard time” believing that I created and built it.

This is the building I’m talking about. Building it required me to do some “math” because this game is… weird in that doing stuff with an even number of blocks – like ten, for example – might not “work” the way you want it to… but eleven blocks will. I know why this is but I can’t explain it but, to continue. I had to figure out how many blocks I needed to create the “foundation” that the rest of what you see was going to be built upon… then I had to build it and that started with clearing out that whole area you see where the building is sitting and “fenced in” with bushes.

Sometimes, that’s easy depending on the seed that’s randomly generated… and sometimes, it’s just not feasible to build one because there’s not a place I’d find suitable. It has to be built on flat land; I tried to build one without “terraforming” the area and, well, let’s just say that I’m not going to try that again. From finding the right place and landscape to actually building one of these can take a couple of days or more and depending on what I have to do before I can start building and if I feel like messing with it. I keep telling myself that I’m not going to build another one because it is labor-intensive but when you look at the picture, yeah, it’s worth it… sometimes.

I was playing with my grandson the other day… and building yet another one of these because, well, I don’t really know why I did but I was doing it and he thought it was cool (but he thinks almost everything I do is cool) and he said that he didn’t know how I could make it better and I said something like the only way to make it better would be to make it bigger… and like these building aren’t big enough already – but you might not be able to see that from the provided picture but it’s so big that bats hang out in there – and if you know about Minecraft’s bats, you get an idea of things.

As I’m watching my grandson working on something he was building and giving him the occasional hint or pointing out that he missed something, I was thinking about how I could make my building bigger and with the understanding that just doubling the number of blocks used to create the foundation wasn’t going to work… because that would make all of the blocks even-numbered ones. Like, to create the front of the building – and after creating a column-like thingy, there has to be 23 blocks between the two columns… but doubling them would make it 46 blocks… and 46 won’t work… but 47 will. I “did the math” and since I know how many blocks are needed just to create one side of the foundation, well, that was easier than the next problem:

Where to build it. I created a few worlds that didn’t fit the bill, like being in a frozen wasteland or in a desert which both had wide open spaces – and read this as meaning no trees – but the terrain was just too uneven and would required way too much work to make it totally flat and as I need it to be. I did use those worlds to test my “math” and I just had to build three parts of it to know that I got it right because I have learned that if I screw it up – and I have screwed it up – it will always happen with those first three sections because the fourth section won’t line up properly.

Hang in here with me, okay?

I found a world that would work for me. Kinda. Lemme start the front-side of the building because that will tell me how much “terraforming” I will have to do. I did that and realized that there’s, um, not quite a mountain smack-dab in the middle of where I can build this… which means that if I want to build this giant-sized version of the building in the picture, I’m gonna have to make that almost a mountain go away. I thought about using the game’s TNT to do some blasting except I’ve found that, um, I’m not all that good at figuring out how much TNT I need and not enough or too much will make sure that I’ll have to work harder than I have to so it’s take that bitch down to the ground one block at a time, one section of a time and while building the foundation as I go along.

There’s just no easy way to do this. I am determined to do this and I didn’t even get to completing the second section of the foundation before I started asking myself, “What are you doing… and why are you doing it?” So far, I’ve been working on this for three days (today will be day number four) and I only have two final sections to complete for the foundation and then the harder work can commence… but I gotta get rid of that damned mountain first. Not just part of it: All of it. Why? Because I like building these things and without having obstructions blocking the views from the many windows in the joint. Now, I have left some stuff “blocking” the view because I didn’t feel like obliterating whatever the blockage was but for some damned reason, I’m going to remove that mountain and as much as I’m not liking having to do it, I’m also having fun doing it.

I’ve been destroying all of the trees and smiling to think about my daughter reading me the riot act for (a) destroying all those trees and not using them and (b) having little or no intention on replanting them. Out of a kind of respect for my Minecraft teacher, I have been avoiding killing the cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs that have been getting in my way all along. Yeah, some of them died… but not at my hand; it’s not my fault they jumped off the ledge that I wound up creating as I take the mountain apart a section at a time! When they’ve done that, I have collected the meat and other stuff they left behind and stored it in a chest I have stashed somewhere out of my way.

It’s not exactly “fun” doing a project like this but I find it to be relaxing as much as it gets on my nerves. Removing a mountain is a ridiculous thing to do and no matter its size. I know this because I’ve done it before and I don’t wanna talk about that any more than this. I’m relaxed. Focused. My Fitbit is happy because my resting pulse is in the low 70s. It is driving me fucking crazy because the more I hack at the stuff I need to go away, it doesn’t feel like I’m really making a lot of progress and, yep, I’m still asking myself, “What are you doing?” I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it. It just doesn’t really make sense to do all of the shit I’ve been doing so that I can get to doing something that I know is going to be a bitch doing… because building the building in the above picture was a bitch… and now I’m making one twice its size.

Why? Because I can. I have the willpower and determination to do it. I actually like having to figure out what needs to go and what needs to be built up or even created to support the building… and it also gets on my nerves. Those of you who don’t play Minecraft might not see or understand why doing something like this is, indeed, a lot of fun since it doesn’t sound like it is… and that’s because it isn’t. But I’m going to do it because, yeah, it’s fun and even therapeutic in a way because I have to build this place from memory and from the ground up; I have to give some very serious thought about the floor and letting the “artistic” side of me come forth to create a pattern on the floor that doesn’t exist in any of the other buildings I’ve built so that while the shape of this building will always be the same, all of the floor are different. I have to… feel the floor then figure out how to do what I’m feeling… and working around the critters the game keeps spawning.

I’ve got a lot of hard work to do before I can get to the hard work of building this giant-sized place. It requires calm patience to keep hacking away at the mountain and being insanely determined to wipe it out. I could work around it and a few times last night, I was gonna do just that but this is also a lesson in if you start something, finish it and no matter how much shit you gotta go through to finish it.

You tear down a mountain to the ground… because it can be done. My daughter would shit a couple of gold bricks and I thought that my late son-in-law – and who was a better builder – would have dived in with me to do something I know that both of us didn’t like doing… because why the hell not? It can be done… so let’s do it. He would have broke out lots of TNT and, against my advice, blown shit up big time and that, too, is fun… if you’re not going to be the one who has to clean it up.

I just had to add this because, well, I was thinking about it as I shut down the work site for the night and looking at what I have left to do… and I’ve only gotten rid of maybe half of the mountain. Half. The nearly completed foundation is… mocking me and reminding me that I’m not finished with it and the longer it takes for me to get to finishing it, the “harder” building it is going to be but, yeah, are we having fun or what?

I am. And not. I don’t have to do this but I’m going to. I started it and I will see it through because I’m not a quitter and this mountain isn’t going to defeat me… well, this time.

Time to go to work. There’s still some mountain to be moved and while I can’t move a lot of the mountains that life can put in my way, I can move and remove this one.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Some Messed Up Stuff

It’s not all that uncommon that when you have a wireless Xbox controller, it’ll lose it’s connection to the console for a moment even though Microsoft doesn’t really offer an explanation of why it’ll do that. It’s annoying and depending on the game you’re playing, a disconnected controller can get you “killed.”

I was playing Elite Dangerous and getting back into playing the game after having decided to take a break from it back in October. As I was hauling some goods from one sector of space to another, my controller would suddenly disconnect and it was a pain in the ass because the game doesn’t stop when paused and given the cargo I was carrying, I knew there was a chance I could be attacked at any moment and with a disconnected controller – and one that refused to reconnect – I could get dead in a hurry.

Fortunately, I could plug my controller into the cable I’d connected to my console and everything went back to normal but I’m baffled and miffed as to why it kept disconnecting. Was it the battery and, as such, not enough power going to the Bluetooth radio in the controller? I even noticed that when I changed batteries, the controller wouldn’t reconnect. I know that it got updated a few days before and noted that since that update, my controller, which has faithfully worked for the years I’ve had it, is just fucking up. I don’t know what was in that update but what I do know is that there’s no way for me to back it out so I can ignore the console’s attempts to update it again.

I don’t mind using the controller when it’s wired… except I have to sit somewhere else because the frigging cable ain’t long enough to reach where I normally sit… and it’s even more “messed up” because having to sit closer changes my perspective when looking at the TV; instead of me looking straight at it, I’m looking at it from an angle or, if I sit on the futon, I’m seriously close to whatever’s going on and for Elite Dangerous, it takes some getting used to and why I don’t sit on the futon.

Maybe I need to replace that controller but, damn, it was working as expected before it got updated and while I could get an aftermarket controller, I don’t have much faith in them. I’ve gotten them before and they’ve broken too easily or just stopped working so I’ve bitten the bullet and paid for a genuine Xbox controller… and those puppies aren’t cheap and more so being on a fixed income.

I have a second controller but the only game I can play with it is… Minecraft because I fucked up and dropped it and broke the left “bumper” and my attempts to super glue it back together failed so until this bullshit started happening with my “main” controller, the second one sits in the charging station and when I need to change batteries, well, there it is and I can keep playing and recharge the spent battery… and I know they’re old and in need of replacing because they’re running out of juice faster than normal and, yeah, maybe they’re the reason why my main controller keeps losing its fucking mind in its wireless mode.

Now I’m playing Elite Dangerous wired to the console but playing Minecraft with my second and busted controller because I don’t need the broken bumper to play the game and, oh, yeah: It’s staying connected and it is to note that the second controller hasn’t been updated since I got it… a few years ago and I’m not going to allow it to be updated should that really be the problem. Microsoft’s solution to this is to either go wired… or buy a new controller. The less-expensive option might be to see if I can find a cable that’s longer than the long one I already have so that I can sit where I normally do and comfortably so. I have kept putting off replacing the broken second controller and I very much regret doing that so, in a way, this crap is the price to be paid for not replacing it when I could do it.

Mea culpa… but, perhaps, not my fault that my main controller doesn’t want to reconnect; it’s like the console and the controller aren’t talking to each other but my attempts to pair it again hasn’t worked; there’s a button on the controller for this and, when pressed should put the controller into pairing mode and I have to push the same button on the console. They both do some blinking and connect but, shit, it’s not happening. I’d suspect that the issue is with the console except the second controller connects and stays connected so that’s not it.

This sucks and it’s inconvenient at the worst. Like most gamers, I have everything I might need right there next to me when I’m playing and, yeah, if I have to go into the kitchen, I sometimes take it with me so I can do something if/when I have to, like playing Elite Dangerous. Until I can either find out why my main controller is acting stupid or find a longer connecting cable, I’ve been relegated to having to move to play any game with my main controller because I learned that if I sit back where I normally sit, I get unplugged. Nothing sucks more than a wireless controller that doesn’t want to work wirelessly.

Big-assed sigh. If it’s truly an issue of my main controller being too old to work with the current console software, I’m just gonna have to find it in my limited budget to replace it and, shit, to replace the broken one and both sets of rechargeable batteries. Today, I’m going to replace the main controller’s rechargeable batteries with AAs and see if that makes a difference and if it doesn’t disconnect – or it does but reconnects – then I know what the real problem is and those batteries are way cheaper than buying a new controller… but I still need to replace the broken one.

Crap. I had a thought of starting one of those funding things so I can get new stuff and, nah, I don’t feel right doing that and for this reason but having this thought took my mind off of scraping around in my head and thinking about how the wireless controller works and, yeah, I do know how it works and it made my head hurt when I was learning this stuff back when I was working. I’ll figure it out but until I do, I just gotta work with what I have to work with.

Okay. I got this out of my head and it’s time to test my battery theory while looking for an extra-long connecting cable… and figuring out when I can afford to replace everything.

While still waiting to see how bad this snowstorm is really going to be.