Now That Winter Hath Come

The past few weeks have been a whole lot of "not much" regarding posts. There's a reason for that, of course: the holidays and family getting back together. Our daughters (oldest and youngest, for those keeping track) came down from Milwaukee and up from Louisville respectively, and my son came over from the east side of town. This included my oldest's three guinea pigs* and my oldest's and son's partners. 

I've also been navigating the potential land mines of extended family gatherings, but thankfully no land mines have been stepped on yet. (A few guinea pig poops, sure, but that's not a big deal.)

My youngest is getting settled into her first post-university apartment, and she starts her first job on Monday. My son has been working his tail off as a seasonal worker and is hoping he gets picked up after the Holidays are over. My oldest completed her first semester of going back to uni for another degree, and is looking forward to next semester. 

So yeah, a lot going on, and that's without me talking about any of the gaming that's been going on. 

You know that I've been playing on the WoW Classic Anniversary servers, but I've also poked my nose into Retail to just watch. No real desire to level or do anything else, but just observing the chaos without getting hit on too much...

It's kind of like looking at the sun: you can't
really stare at it without it hurting your eyes.

This was in Ironforge on Boxing Day on
Moon Guard-US. This is easily the most
people I've seen in Retail Ironforge over the past
few months. COMBINED. On the Anniversary servers,
there's always a bit of a crowd here.

The more I think about it, I stand out in the
Lion's Pride crowd because I'm fully clothed.
And I look, well, normal.

Chaos, indeed.

But I've also been playing a bit of Stardew Valley here and there. I get the urge to do another playthrough every several months or so, and once I complete the basic 2 year portion of the game I'm good for another half a year or more.

Yes, for a farming game I made Cardwyn.
Who grew up on a farm.

Beyond that, I've not been doing terribly much, video game-wise. I've been delving into this other hobby a bit more often:

Yes, that's my hand. And my
Yaesu FT-70D, as well.

It keeps me busy and has gotten me to thinking ahead as to where I want to take this amateur radio hobby. I believe that Pallais has suggested that I continue writing about this new hobby, so I need to write a follow-up.

Anyway, catch you all on the flip side of the year.

*If you thought having a dog is like having a toddler around, guinea pigs will see you and raise you a few "wheeks!"

All I Really Need is a Place for My Stuff

I have a confession to make: our house is not something that Marie Kondo would say sparks joy.

When you put two pack rats* together with three kids, you're going to have piles of stuff to move around on a regular basis. While I'd like to look at my home as a place to relax and enjoy myself, when you get right down to it, I look at a home as a place for my stuff.

You knew I was going to put this here, didn't you?
This is one of the George Carlin routines that aged well.

I don't really have a sense of decoration, either. I've seen what some people call "decoration" and I think that I can't see the walls from all of the pictures on them. On the flip side, I'm not a big fan of the minimalist look, either. I just want a place for everything, and enough furniture and decoration that don't look like they came out of the 60s/70s/80s to make it work. Despite my best intentions, I simply can't get things decorated well. Not for a lack of trying, mind you, but I also have to balance my mom and my in-laws dumping decorations and whatnot on us that we really don't need with my own distaste of the items themselves. 

My own home was built in the mid-80s, and it shows. The two story and bi-level/split-level homes built in that era all have the same general look about them; they tend to be boxy, but they get maximum use out of minimal space. The oversized great rooms and specialty areas of the houses that were built afterward simply don't exist, so my home office is set where the dining room was originally designed to reside.**

So you know where this is going, right?

This is what my homes in video games tend to look like, if I'm left to my own devices:

It's a bit blocky, but it works.

Penny would occasionally complain about
all those chests around; I ought to do something
about that one of these days. Note that most
of the furniture there came with the house.

So yeah, I'm decoratively challenged and I look at houses as a place to put things, rather than to live in them. (It's a failing.)

MMO housing doesn't make me squeal with delight as it does some people. I mean, it's great to look at when it's done well, and believe me, I've seen plenty of people who have done it well --some even read the blog!-- but that seems to be beyond my capacity. I don't have any screencaps of the home I had in LOTRO, but the front of it looked like a stereotypical backwoods shack with all sorts of broken down material scattered around in front.

In other words, I think I would give Marie Kondo a heart attack.

***

So when I saw that this dropped in Retail WoW yesterday...

From an email dated 12/3/2025.

I realized that I was not the target audience. 

That's fine. I don't need to be the target of MMO salesmanship; after all, I'm not a big spender when it comes to DLC and whatnot. If anything, that translates in-game to me not really pursuing monetary or bling-centric goals.***

To those who are reveling in the chance to play around with housing, I wish you the best of luck. I'll be reading your blog posts!

*Yes, I'm calling myself out. I may not have as much stuff as my wife does, and I do throw things out more than she does, but there are plenty of things that I know I'll keep until I die. 

**We never formally entertained people, and we've never used the fine china that we were obligated to request in our wedding lists. In fact, all those plates and utensils and whatnot are still in storage in the basement, having never been used once. I think the only thing we ever did use were the wine glasses, and those are also now in storage since a) we have a lot of "free" glasses given to us from the local wine festival over the years, and b) I can't really drink alcohol much any more.

***Despite what some people may think, I count Epic Riding and Epic Flying as bling-centric. If it becomes a requirement to do something, I'm going to push even harder against it. But that's just me.

By The Way... Here's the CASH SHOP!!

Do you think I'm being snarky? Well, here's what the login screen looks like after Tuesday's patch cycle in WoW:

Yeah, Hoots again. No biggie.
This is what the stable of toons looks like
on April 8th, 2025.

See that bar on the top? If you select the Mode button, you get this:

Five separate "Classic WoW" modes.

The Shop (thankfully) doesn't have anything for the non-progression WoW Classic modes:

Soon.... Right?

Well, given that the Cash Shop button used to be inconspicuously in the bottom left of the loading screen, such as what you can still find in Cataclysm Classic...

Ta da!

That tells me they're aiming to utilize the Cash Shop in WoW Classic Era and its clones.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Operation Spread the Love update...

***

As you can see, I did not reach the so-called midway point in leveling any of my toons this past couple of weeks. Part of that is due to the slowdown in leveling itself, but another part of it was due to my interest in fishing.

I guess I should be happy that Card took advantage
of that free port to Moonglade during the Lunar Festival.

Since my toons were all over L25, they could spend a gold --not a cheap endeavor in a Vanilla Classic environment like the Anniversary servers are-- and get a book you can read to gain access to the next level of a lot of secondary professions: Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, etc. So Card picked up the Fishing and Cooking upgrades and then set about leveling both.

If you've never played Old World style of WoW, the process of leveling Fishing and Cooking is pretty much symbiotic: you fish to raise your Fishing skill, but also for the raw fish you can then cook to raise your Cooking skill. Once I got my Fishing skill high enough, it was late enough at night for me to go ahead and see if I could fish in Moonglade for that classic catch, the Nightfin Snapper. 

Nightfin can only be caught at night in certain places around Azeroth, but as long as you have access to Moonglade, it's at least safe to be fished for there. Most other places are in high level zones, the lowest being Feralas with the upper L40s / lower L50s mobs, so that's definitely not safe for a lowbie toon like my stable. Nightfin can also be cooked to create a food beneficial for casters, so they tend to be in high demand by the raiding community and min/maxers.

How high? Right now 5 raw Nightfin sell for about 2 gold 50 silver to 3 gold, which is an enormous sum to someone still leveling.

I discovered that as long as Card added a bobber to her fishing pole, she could fish for a stack of 20 Nightfin over the course of about 45 minutes. Therefore, she spent several evenings fishing up a stack or two so I could build up a bit of a war chest for when these toons need a huge influx of cash.

The funny thing is, I enjoyed the fishing a lot more that I thought I would. 

Usually, I fish because I need mats for a raid --well, not anymore-- or I'm waiting around before I go and do something else. This past week, however, has re-exposed me to the joys of in-game fishing once more. It also calms me down, because I don't have to spend time thinking about where to go next or what to do (or what a particular toon has already done); I can just relax and chill for a while. It may slow down my leveling, but given that Blizzard is now expecting TBC Classic to release in Q1 2026, I'm still in no hurry to get to L60.

Okay, that's not quite true, there are days when I want to get a toon to L60 so I can get into some of the L60 instances or run a Battleground. Then again, I see the stress that my Questing Buddy is under* to try to find more inventive ways to get gear, and I just shake my head.

I do fish a lot in Stardew Valley, though!
From IGN. Alas that I have no screencaps of my
variations on Red fishing.

On those days, fishing sounds like a good idea.

*I should clarify this. She puts herself willingly under that stress, because that's the sort of person she is. I think that's the difference that the 15-16 years of age between us makes: I no longer care to chase after that sort of hardcore play (if I ever did, honestly) because I realize that it will only fuel my Imposter Syndrome. And I really don't need any extra help from that angle.

EtA: Corrected some grammar and reinserted another half of a sentence that I mistakenly deleted.

My, How Things Have Changed

I'm one of those people who end up gravitating toward a standard way of playing, and despite my willingness to try different strategies I end up following the same old path.

Take Stardew Valley, for instance.

Yes, I actually used Cardwyn for this
particular playthrough, because here her
name is kind of unique.

Despite all of my best intentions, the sheer volume of games that I've played there with variations of Redbeard as my character's name can look pretty daunting. The current playthrough I'm doing is yet another permutation of my own name, and yes he has red hair and a beard.

Another quirk of my Stardew Valley games is that I end up with a similar layout of crops and animal habitats. Not because it's the most efficient, per se, but because the crops are grown close to the shack I live in and I clear that area first. The next area I clear is a path leading to the woods to the south, so I stick the animals in a fenced area over there.

Kind of like this.

And so on, and so on.

Finally, although I make a point when I start each game to tell myself that I'm going to try to romance other NPCs, I pretty much always end up selecting Penny or Leah. This is not an accident, as both of them have qualities I see in my wife. That they are both redheads is kind of a cherry on top of the sundae, so to speak, as I've a thing for redheads.*

In spite of that, I have at one occasion or another romanced almost all of the other eligible candidates out there, just to see what their storyline is like all the way to the end.

There's been a few major updates to Stardew Valley since I last played, and it seems that Eric Barone has make some dialog changes to the characters. While the main cutscenes up through to 10 Hearts is unchanged, the dialogue when you talk to all of the NPCs has been expanded by a bit. While it's not a complete overhaul, for a few NPCs it does make a measurable difference.**

Okay Leah, I get the hint. Have you been
talking to my doctor or something?

It made Haley more interesting, which surprised me.

Haley, for those who haven't played the game, is the stereotypical popular blonde girl who is pretty superficial. If you've ever talked to someone in high school who looks on you with active disdain for not being 'with it', that's Haley. Of the romanceable NPCs in Stardew Valley, she and Alex are tied for the most vain and disliked by me. Yes, I know that some people might think similar things about Shane or Sebastian --or early Abigail interactions-- but being not one of the popular kids in real life meant I had a similar visceral reaction to Haley and Alex when I first began playing. 

In this most recent run-through, I was expecting to pretty much stay with the tried and true, but early on I noticed that some of Haley's most annoying commentary had been trimmed (or I'd gotten lucky and avoided it) and some of her new commentary wasn't all that bad. (By her standards, anyway.) That intrigued me, and when you combine that with her Spring birthday she ended up with more hearts than she usually gets in one of my playthroughs. 

Well, I thought, she doesn't seem quite so stuck up as usual, so I figured I'd let the chips fall where they may and let the game progress naturally. 

As usually happens, my traditional romance partners caught up and passed her, but Haley did hold her own, so when decision time finally came for me --selecting which NPC to turn from a friend to a romantic partner-- it came down to Penny, Leah, Abigail, and Haley. The two tried and true, the adventurous wildcard, and Haley.

In the end, I selected Haley.

I'm pretty sure this is one of the new dialogue options.
The Winter clothing definitely is new.

I was quite surprised how much she'd grown over the course of the game, and she really blossomed into a caring woman. Her 14 heart cutscene** really showed she's no longer a shallow person, and that she had the drive and initiative to do something without making that something all about her. While she still enjoys the beach and makeup and whatnot, there's a lot of caring and depth to her now that I'd never seen before.

Who knew?

*Yes, my wife is a redhead.

**I'm aware that Stardew Valley has a ton of mods out there for it, ranging from mild to risqué to converting the game into a mathematical exercise that a WoW add-on user would love. Among the mods out there is one that changes the dialogue of the NPCs, and I suppose that is the inspiration for some of these changes that Eric made in Stardew Valley.

***If you haven't played the game in a few years, yes, there's now a 14 heart cutscene for married companions.

EtA: Corrected grammar. They're their there...

Fighting the Demons

The other week, my son asked me how Baldur's Gate 3 was going. 

"I haven't really touched it since we last talked about it a month ago," I replied. He is quite aware that I try not to go bananas when playing a video game, and for me that means playing a game in fits and starts.

Yes, I'm aware that I play MMOs --and WoW Classic Era-- very regularly. The thing is, in those games I'm not very goal oriented these days, so it's more to play just so I can hang out with other people. Or people watch wherever I'm at.

There's always something going on in Vivec City.
Even at the bank.

Still, I worry about my ability to control myself, as I have the tendency is to go "all-in" on playing a game I like that I'm progressing through. So I play a bit, then I force myself to back off. Once I create a bit of separation, that magical pull that a game or a book or a piece of music has on me lessens, and I feel better able to balance my desires with my needs. 

BG3 is definitely a game that I enjoy playing. It has some moments that make me go WTF, such as your companions' backstories*, but overall I enjoy it a lot. It scratches that RPG itch that I don't get often enough these days, just as Age of Wonders 4 scratches that Fantasy building game itch that Master of Magic first gave me.**

Hey Sundren, how are you doing?
I remember you from Age of Wonders III.

So when I told my son that I hadn't played in what was effectively a month, he wasn't surprised. One of his friends had begun playing BG3 recently, and he was having to balance the video game with all of his grad school work that needed to be finished before the end of the semester. I didn't envy that friend of his one damn bit.

***

I suppose I've always known to a certain extent that I am prone to addiction. 

If I find something I like, I tend to do it over and over to an almost unhealthy extent. Even before the Satanic Panic derailed my D&D youth, I used to read and re-read The Lord of the Rings. And before that, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.

This was the version of the books that I had.
From Amazon.

I clearly remember my dad coming into my room when I was in 8th Grade and sick with a cold, and he informed me I had better start reading something else than "those darn Tolkien books". Of course, that made me want to re-read them even more often just to spite him, but I instead turned my mind toward other Fantasy and Science Fiction***.

During my freshman year at college, I had problems transitioning to college level work because I got distracted by Star Trek, of all things.**** That Fall of 1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, and the friends at college and I would watch the show religiously and talk about it after. The internet was still in its protracted infancy and email access was restricted at UD, so those of us who liked geeky pastimes could only rely upon face-to-face contact for such discussion. So there I was, struggling to keep up with my studies, but all I could think about was Star Trek. 

Yes, I was a nerd. You had to ask?

When my grades began slipping to the point where my scholarship was in danger --and my dad made sure I knew about it-- I had to take drastic action. So I began dialing it back on Captain Picard and crew.

I wasn't as self-destructive as some people I knew in college, such as the person who lived in the dorm next to me. He didn't last a semester at college, as about 6-8 weeks in he discovered the pleasures of partying and simply stopped caring about his classes.***** His girlfriend (who was attending Notre Dame) contacted us because he had even gone silent with her, and she was worried. My roommate and a couple of other people on our dorm floor, including our Resident Assistant, basically held an intervention and convinced him it was smarter to drop out to get his life back together before he ruined it completely.#

Still, watching that happen was a sobering experience. There were several instances of people on my dorm floor imploding and getting themselves on academic probation, enough so that the joke was that our floor had the lowest GPA in the entire building, and that was despite several people with excellent grades calling our floor home.

***

Even today I have to be careful lest I get sucked into some distraction to the point where I haven't gotten any of the normal activities of home life completed. This goes for work as well, because I've had to be told more than once over the course of my career to basically "stay in my lane" and not do other work I found interesting but wasn't part of my job description. 

So while I'd love to be farther along in playing some of these video games, I know that I have to be on my guard. Writing down lists of things to do, much like how you'd write out a grocery list, help to keep me on track from being distracted too much, but even then my sense of time can get all thrown off when I'm absorbed in something. Maybe I ought to set a timer.

You and me both, Jodi.

*I have a post I'm working on about that.

**I should clarify that the original Sim City, Sim Earth, and hell, even Santa Paravia for those old farts like me were the video games that inspired my love of building and development games. 

I actually have a printout of the source code
of the game in TRS-80 BASIC. I'd meant to convert
it to TI-99 4/A BASIC, but I never got around to
it. Something something hormones something something.
From datadrivengamer.blogspot.com.

***Likely to his displeasure. He never read fiction, much less F&SF.

****Given that I went to an all-boys high school, you'd think that I'd have said "girls" instead of Star Trek. And you're not wrong in that having girls in classes were a distraction after years of not having them around, but you have to understand I dealt with that already in high school. My junior year of high school I took Spanish III, and since only two of us signed up for the class they sent us over to the "sister" all-girls high school next door. I should have known that something was up when my classmate and I discovered we were in two separate classes, but even I was surprised on that first day of school I walked to the classroom and knocked, only to see thirty pairs of eyes turn and look at me. 

"Spanish III?" I asked.

The teacher smiled. "Sí sí," she replied. "Red?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, my face likely showing my mind turning to mush, as a wave of laughter swept the the class. It wasn't enough that I was outnumbered 30:1, but that they were all really attractive as well meant that I was in for a very long year.

"Do you want to sit somewhere up here?" the teacher asked, motioning to a desk in front. 

"No, I'll take this one right. back. here." I replied, sliding into the desk in the back by the door to another round of light laughter.

TL;DR: I survived the year, but that's because I made myself as invisible as possible. I'd say about 5-6 of the girls knew me from grade school, so most of them were a total unknown to me. My biggest takeaway from that year was that if you kept quiet you got to hear all sorts of interesting things about people's lives, particularly their love life. I also (now) realized that I missed a few obvious hints that some of the girls dropped that they were interested in me. This period of my life will come back from time to time, so don't be surprised if this reappears in a subsequent post.

*****I was there when it happened; we'd gone out on a Saturday night to the university village, nicknamed The Ghetto at the time, and we came across a student house that had kegs there but very few people in attendance. At the time I didn't drink so I passed (they got me a Mt. Dew, I think), but about halfway through his first beer our floormate decided he really really liked that stuff and he just started plowing through the beer like there was no tomorrow. He and another guy we were with got totally plastered and it took us the better part of an hour to walk them back to the dorm.

#As far as I know, it didn't help. Someone who was a mutual acquaintance ran into him at a concert back in their hometown a year or two later, and he was well down the "throwing your life away" path.

EtA: I corrected the time from 3-4 weeks to 6-8 weeks, as it was late October when this began.

Building for Fun and Profit

I've mentioned before that I play and enjoy the game Stardew Valley, which can be a welcome diversion from other games I play. It's definitely not a deep game by any stretch, but it is a fun and satisfying game. Well, I think I've found a competitor to the "let's play farmer" Stardew Valley.

In the last Steam Winter Sale, I acquired a few titles to play when I wasn't playing any of my "regular" games. Among them was "My Time at Portia", a game that I'd kept my eye on for quite a while. It hadn't been garnering the same overwhelming interest that Stardew Valley had, but the concept of a "builder" type of game in the same Stardew Valley genre, but in 3D* intrigued me. However, I'd been holding back from purchasing the game as it had spent a long time in early access. I do enough IT work for my job to not want to volunteer to be a beta tester, which is what early access effectively means, so I was content to wait for MTaP to officially be released before purchasing the game.

Well, it went live back in mid-late 2019, so when it went on sale in December I finally decided to pull the trigger. My Time at Portia sat around in my Steam Library for a few weeks, and I finally decided to download the game last week to see whether it meets expectations.

My answer is a "sort of yes", but I also haven't stopped playing the game this past week.**

***

My Time at Portia (MTAP for short) is set in what is described as a "post apocalyptic world", but it is far removed from the type of post apocalyptic world that, say, Fallout resides in. There are ruins a-plenty to explore, but most of the countryside and the area around Portia are pretty much an idyllic farming community. You learn over the course of playing the game that there was a 300 year age of darkness across the land after some cataclysmic war --likely a nuclear war with a Nuclear Winter causing the darkness-- and it was only after a plucky adventurer named Peach brought back the sunshine that the world began to recover.

Yeah, I know. 'Peach'? Really?

But regardless, that's just background so you'll find monsters and ruins and whatnot to explore out there in the world, ala D&D or any other setting of that sort.

I'm going to try to avoid some of the finer details here, since you have to discover the game yourself, but I can cover some broad strokes here about the game itself.

You are a builder, taking over your father's old shop that he'd left abandoned years ago. You never really knew your father, so you're just learning a bit about him and Portia, the community he lived in, as you go. The game itself is part construction game, part dating/getting-to-know-the-community game, and part story about Portia itself.

The basics of the game are pretty simple: You go get commissions to build things from either the Guild Hall or from townspeople who reach out to you directly. Typically you have a time limit on how long it will take to get something built, and the early game especially is spent trying to build up your equipment so that you can then actually build things for people. Oh, and acquiring the raw materials to do so from the surrounding countryside (and the ruins). There are abandoned ruins, which are great for ores, stone, and the occasional ancient relic you need to make something with; a countryside with trees, shrubs, and wild animals you can use to get raw materials from; and townspeople/farmers/ranchers who do own shops that might have what you need as well. As you progress, the requests get more and more elaborate, forcing you to upgrade and stockpile raw materials to try to stay one step ahead of the requests. Oh, and you can also upgrade your house and land as you see fit, so there's a metagame surrounding how you want to organize your pad.

Setting that aside, there's the metagame of the townspeople itself. You have a scale of diamonds (for townspeople you can develop friendships with) or hearts (for townspeople you can romance). Interactions with townspeople on a daily basis will raise their approval of you, and as you progress you learn more about them and you unlock the ability to hang out with them. For those who can be romanced, once you get high enough in the heart listings you can then confess your romantic interest in them and the "playdates" turn into "real dates".***

And above this lies the overall story that the devs wanted to present about Portia. When I think I'm at the point where things will slow down, storywise, it picks up again.

***

Okay, that's pretty much how the game goes, mechanically speaking.

Does it scratch my builder's itch? Yes.

Does it scratch my interest in the story? Yes.

Then do I give it a resounding seal of approval? Kind of.

Why the "kind of" response? Well....

1. The graphics, while pretty to look at, aren't designed to appeal to me.
   
   Oh, don't get me wrong, the landscape is really nice, and the buildings/stuff you build are rather nice in a cartoony kind of way. I'd describe that as Wildstar meets Thomas Kincaid, I guess. However, the character design has more than a bit of Rugrats style cartoon in them, and the Rugrats style did not appeal to me. On top of that, you can tell that the character designs were angling to try to appeal to both adults and kids, so some of the marriageable characters look adult (such as Arlo or Petra or Phyllis), and others look like adults with kid-style faces (Sam is the best example here). The character designs also had a certain "street caricature artist" aesthetic to them as well, which kind of bugged me from time to time.
   
2. It needs more polishing.
   
   Even after its official release, I find small bugs here and there, mainly in the writing.
   
   Let me put it out there before anybody else asks: I could tell that the development team's native language was not English almost from the start. There are certain speech patterns that native English speakers have that non-native English speakers have a hard time picking up, and once I noticed the first mistake I started finding them throughout the game. What makes it worse is that about 1/5 of the voice actors' lines are different than the lines on screen. You can tell that changes were made, but QA didn't align the voice actors' lines with the on-screen lines. Given that the voice actors' deviations typically made less sense than the written ones, I suspect that the written lines were the ones that got more polish**** than the spoken lines, and the dev team didn't have the budget to re-record the voice actors.
   
3. The path finding. Oh, the path finding.
   
   Have you seen videos of some of the worst Skyrim path finding bugs? Or maybe the Skyrim spoof? Yeah, it's like that. At one point you're on a quest with an NPC deep in one of the ruins, and I turned around, wondering where on earth the NPC had gotten. Turns out said NPC was underneath the catwalk I was on, walking through the instant death goo below. /sigh
   
   I've also seen bugs where an NPC keeps trying to get on a horse and the NPC keeps flickering between on the ground and on the horse. These are pathfinding issues that have seemingly been solved in most other video games, so the dev team really needs to tweak their code in this space.
   
4. The stereotypes.
   
   If you're looking for deep characterization, video games typically aren't people's first choice. That being said, the NPCs are a laundry list of stereotypes: The Hot Farmgirl, The Idealistic College Student, The Church vs. The Scientists*****, The Greedy Competitor, The Tomboy, The Sassy Waitress With the Brooklyn Accent, The Farmer's Daughter Living with the Elderly Grandma, the Hot Girl with the Mysterious Illness, etc. They even have seven brothers who look and sound like they came right out of an episode of The Sopranos.******
   
   The NPCs would also say the same couple of lines over and over again, depending on where you were with the story, so you quickly got used to the same thing over and over and over.
   
5. The Pacing
   
   At first I thought the game was going to be fairly slow paced, but once you get into the mid-game everything seems to have a timer on it and there seems to be not enough time for me to get into tweaking my house and workspace the way I like it. The game burns through a daily clock much faster than Stardew Valley does, and I have to constantly be on my toes to organize my build schedule properly.
   

Okay, given that list, it's a wonder why I'm still willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt. That's because the issues aside, it's still a fairly well made indie title. I'd be tempted to say that the dev team is likely more familiar with creating mobile games rather than regular PC/XBox/Playstation titles, and there are aspects of MTAP that seem to fit in better with mobile games --particularly the character graphics-- but it's still a decently built game overall. If the dev team continues to fix the bugs --and more importantly get an editor to clean up the language translation issues-- I think that MTAP will do fairly well for itself.

The game is obviously not for everybody, but when it's on sale it's worth a gander. If you like Stardew Valley you might like MTAP.

But I really need to get back to MMOs now....





*And in third person view, no less.

**I finally got around to logging back into WoW and also playing a few other games last night. Nothing fancy, just wanted to work on Cardwyn's Tailoring.

***Really, it's called "Play", and I'm not making this up.

****Although they could REALLY use a lot more polish than this.

*****Okay, this is still a pretty valid trope.

******True Story: Back when I was at college, I went with a group to a conference in New York City. On a Saturday night, we went into Little Italy to get some food. I kid you not, there were tons of little Italian-American restaurants there complete with a guy out in front --typically dressed in a loud suit-- who would try to get us to go inside. No matter which restaurant we passed by, the guy would also have that heavy NYC accent that made the whole thing feel like we'd stepped into a bad gangster movie.

A Musical Friday Post

In case a prior post didn't make it plain, I'm a fan of Stardew Valley.* Therefore, when The Doubleclicks posted this cover of the Stardew Valley Theme, I knew I had to post this.

*Who did I marry? Penny, although I seriously considered Leah.

What Happened to July?

Well, college visits happened.

Lots and lots of college visits.

But they're all finished now. 

I didn't think I'd be happy to get back to a regular work schedule, but after driving across multiple states, visiting multiple universities, and hearing a similar spiel from multiple admissions counselors/deans, yeah, I'm ready to get back to the grind.

However, gaming didn't simply stop while I was away from the blog. In fact, I started playing a non-MMO that if you'd have told me about a year ago I'd be playing, I'd think you were absolutely crazy: Stardew Valley.

I decided to buy the game on the gigantic mid-Summer Steam sale mainly based on the story behind the development of the game in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels*. If I bought a game I was going to play it (eventually), so I fired it up sometime in mid-July and tried it out for what I thought would be a couple of hours.

I'm presently now into Year Four of my first character, am married, and now have a kid.

"A couple of hours" my ass.

It is a strangely addictive game, where the storyline isn't exactly deep by any stretch, but due to the nature of the saves (it appears to only be able to save when you go to sleep each night) it can lure you into working "just another day" without realizing you're committing to an extra 10-30 minutes playing.

The nostalgia element is very strong as well, because even though I never played an NES or SNES or Nintendo 64, I recognize the design that Eric Barone was striving for. The gameplay was the most important part of the design, because any part of the game where there would have been a choice of gameplay vs. realism the design went for gameplay instead. Farming Simulator 2018 this isn't, and the game is actually better for it. It's kind of weird seeing a chick grow to an adult chicken over the course of a week of "game time", and especially weird going from "I'm pregnant" to "the kid is born" in almost as short a time.** Still, it works within the game because the entire design compresses the time into a manageable size of 28 day seasons; any longer and the attraction the game holds will fade, and any shorter and the game loses a sense of space.

Stardew Valley's not without its bugs. I occasionally click on a character that I can talk to and nothing pops up, and a couple of conversations --especially for those NPCs whom I've maxed out the "affection" meter-- seem to be missing some parts. That being said, as a game designed and implemented by one person, it's a tremendous achievement.

Stardew Valley is one of those games that I wish I'd have created. I don't get that feeling often, because I know how hard it is to code something as deceptively simple as a text only RPG game, but the siren call of Stardew Valley is that strong.

Eric Barone has created a helluva game, and he should rightly be praised for this achievement. But that leaves me with one question for Eric: When are Clint and Emily going to get together?

*Geez, I seem to be plugging that book a lot lately.

**I kind of have some experience in this area, given the three mini-Reds.