Hellooooo! Yes, yes, I know it’s been a few weeks now, and I’m sorry about that, but I’m here now ok? … and maybe I’ll manage to shine some light on my absence. 

The end of July was equal parts super hot and super busy which turns out isn’t a good combination for maintaining even a leisurely blogging pace such as mine. I even managed to have a few days of work with the intention of getting some DIY done and have a bit of a blogging spree, but the DIY was severely scaled back to the hours before 11am and after 4pm due to the heat and the blogging just didn’t get started. The frustrating part was that it was even too hot to really play games, let alone write about them. 

The super busy stuff was mostly work related. I have just begun a new job… which is pretty similar to my old job, only in a different department. Of course there was a rush of report writing and meetings to wrap up my former responsibilities before this past week which has been a blur of minor panic realising that I know so little about my new subject area.

On top of all of this I have… sort of… begun a new side project in the form of some fiction writing. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while now, especially given how much I’ve enjoyed dabbling in the bits of fiction I’ve written here. I can’t guarantee it’ll ever see the light of day, but it will likely put additional strain on my overall writing time as I find it hard to hold ideas for more than one chunk of non-work writing in my head at a time.

… a typical scenario seems to be that when I’m writing fiction I feel guilty about not writing the next blog post and when I’m writing the blog post I keep thinking about how I want to get on writing fiction… and of course I MOST want to write something other than work stuff when I’m at work, but that’s a perpetual state of affairs. 

Of course there have been some interesting things happening… which reminds me, I’ve signed up to be part of an excellent upcoming community event hosted by Normal Happenings which is going to be a tidal wave of personal insights in to some of my favourite bloggers’ favourite games. Also this year’s Blogger Blitz has begun, hosted by that master of mischief Ian at Adventure Rules … please please please don’t tell me the round 1 result just yet – I’m very behind with my reading and I want to make sure I have a moment to fully settle in to the entries. 

July Wrap Up

The first of the two posts that I did manage to publish in July was a further exploration of my ongoing (highly casual and meandering) mission to find the best Jurassic Park Game. For this instalment I went back to 1993 and played the DOS Jurassic Park game by Ocean. I know there was a little disappointment that I didn’t stream this as I had done with Trespasser, however during my test play I realised that this just wouldn’t be an interesting game to watch. I spent a long time playing it on and off and it falls into the category of …sooo… where am I going… more often than not. Having said that it’s actually kind of an interesting game overall with its isometric and first person sections.

Secondly I discussed the failure of Chess games as Videogames. It’s kind of a weird topic, and I’m pretty surprised that ardent Chess… erm… aficionados haven’t been banging at my virtual door demanding their nickel back for the show.

On top of all of that.. and despite any better judgement… I’ve fallen back in to a comfy Fortnite:BR pit. It’s difficult to flaw how you can fully settle in to that no-nonsense… or rather lots of nonsense… 3rd person battle royale, especially the easy going 50 vs 50 mode for people like me who generally suck at the game. In the wake of this I decided to re-install it’s MMS big-brother, PU:BG once more and see how development from that has come on… and honestly, after months of playing Fortnite it felt janky and bland. PUBG suffered accusations of asset flipping a little while ago and on reading the reports I respected to developer response saying that given the size of the team, yes it was necessary to use asset store content to fill out such a large game world, giving them time to focus on developing gameplay. Revisiting however it feels so lacking in any sort of visual distinctiveness or personality that I couldn’t help myself in starting to see the asset flip accusations as at least partially understandable. Combined with the long waiting times between matches and frequent rubber-banding I quickly re-uninstalled it… remind me to read that last paragraph back to myself if I ever get the urge to play it again. 

Looking Ahead to August

The first thing I’m going to do is cut myself some slack and relax my blogging schedule. It’s weird, but even self-imposed schedules bring with them some tension when you’re struggling to meet them and at the moment (with the new job) I can’t really handle that so posts are just going to be as and when I feel like it. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring everything back in to line once I settle and the end of the year (including the cooler weather) rolls around.

From a gaming point of view, there’s really not that much on the horizon. There aren’t any big releases on the horizon and the only game that I have my eye on (the latest Jurassic World Game… of course) is still far too expensive for me to splash out on.

Of course I also want to continue with my fiction side-project and I’m still weighing up weather or not I should go to EGX later in the year. Luckily it’s not too far away so I often decide very late to just drive up.

Happy August Everyone!