Kakomando (2023) [7 min] by Alexandra Bloch, Clémence Collignon, Louis Augustine Lubega, Bertil Toby Swanekiaer and Delaly Guy Corneille Tchocodo | #France
I'm in an odd position, I'm at the grand old age of 53, and after over 20 years of wishing I could, I've finally realised I am not too old to do #parkour training.
So I've spent several months bringing my fitness and strength up. I'm a bit overweight, but otherwise in good nick.
But being an older person taking up what is generally a younger person's sport, I'm overcome with shyness at the prospect of encountering other people doing parkour training. I need to overcome this.
This parkour video is pretty awesome, has excellent cinematography, and Vancouver residents will recognize lots of spots. I think anyone would smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sul_o_S5ND8
Most of the cats that visit our garden are used to the rabbits and ignore them, but Luna has been showing a bit more interest of late, and Wally (ginger) isn’t too happy about it. (Remember rabbits can’t look forward so this is him staring her out)
After a couple of minutes of this Luna did the “get ready to pounce” wriggle bottom thing so I shouted “Oi!” and everyone scattered. I did want to give her the benefit of the doubt though.
Started the afternoon in Hades, and made it to Heaven tonight in Neon White! Spent most of it finding the gifts and grinding for Ace Badges. Someday if I'm brave enough I'll go for the Dev Badges. :a_thisisfine:
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
This is genuinely the hardest time I've had reviewing a game.
You enter the game as a character that has just died; with no memory of your past, you find yourself in ... heaven?
As a visitor, or a "Neon". You've been put into a competition; while you should be in hell, you've been tasked with earning a spot in heaven by killing the most demons who are trying to invade heaven.
You do this through the power of parkour... and guns. Lots of... cards?
Instead of guns, as you parkour around the place (thus the platforming part), you find cards. Each card represents a different weapon, and discarding the card has a secondary effect.
One card, for instance, is a handgun with thirty bullets. Run towards a demon, shoot it in the face, run past where it was, around the corner, jump and discard the card mid-jump for double-jump to allow you to reach the next platform.
Time it wrong, and you're stuck, and have to restart the level. Restarting is quick, which is good, because you'll be doing it a lot; you need to chain all of these different moves together, because traversing the level is timed, and the faster you complete it, the better the rewards.
The better the rewards, the better the chance that you'll win first place, and the place in heaven.
Neon White is weird and frantic and challenging and...
Ghostrunner is a first-person sword-slasher game. It is deeply, frustratingly fast.
I am deeply, frustratingly, exhausted. I spent most of the evening trying to troubleshoot my PC to find out why it had suddenly turned into a snail. It appears that one of my usual running apps has been "updated" in a way that means I now get 8-10 FPS in-game.
This was after the discovery that at some stage recently, Riot games started forcing their POS launcher to automatically run "in the background" if the Xbox app was running.
Except it appeared to somehow be triggering a subset of the Xbox app to run, even if the Xbox app wasn't actually running, meaning it was unkillable.
Long story short, what Riot began with Valorant's shitty DRM, they finished with this stunt. I still had LoL installed on my machine from when my son tried to convince me to start playing it, so every trace of every piece of Riot's garbage has been wiped off my system.
After two hours of this collective bullshit, I barely had enough time to actually play Ghostrunner before midnight.
I suspect that I'm just too exhausted at this point to coordinate my hands well enough to not die repeatedly (somewhere close to 60 deaths within 15 minutes). The game helpfully keeps count.
I'm going to give Ghostrunner the benefit of the doubt, mark it down for a RePlay, and rate it:
September 7, 2023 - Day 250 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 271
Game: Mirror's Edge Catalyst
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 7, 2016
Library Date: Nov 26, 2022
Unplayed: 285d (9m12d)
Playtime: 24m
Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a first person parkour & melee game.
Today I also learned, after giving in and playing it without playing Mirror's Edge first, it is not in fact, a sequel. It's a reboot.
I use a Logitech G13 Gameboard for my gaming, which has a terrible design flaw in the thumb button, which causes the activation lug for the microswitch to snap off.
I have the thumb button set to "jump".
I've had some replacements 3D-printed, but they usually don't last more than a few months.
This one didn't last the game.
The thing about this game (which looks gorgeous!) is that learning each of the moves feels a little bit frustrating to try and pull off, but once I started to "get" it, it felt good.
When I managed to start stringing them together it felt great.
But then when you get into that flow state, where you start anticipating the moves just before you need to pull them off, that feels amazing...
...until the jump button stops working.
Anyway, looks like I'm pulling my G13 apart again tomorrow to swap out yet another activation lug.
Cyber Hook is a retrowave-themed first-person parkour-with-grappling-hook 3D platformer.
Another game pulled randomly from the spreadsheet of doom.
Love the aesthetic, found the game somewhat frustrating due to the default key assignments, and my lack of general coordination.
In Just Cause, the grapple is deployed with the right mouse button, and shooting with the left.
In Cyber Hook, this is inverted. I swapped them around, which helped, but the mechanic feels just different enough to be frustrating; I have to think instead of just reacting.
The shift key is assigned slow down time, instead of speeding things up (most games assign it to run).
Speedrunning is not really my thing, so Cyber Hook just feels a bit:
Hey there! I guess I should do a formal #introduction then :P
I'm Starbeamrainbowlabs, a Computer Science #PhD Student Researcher at the University of Hull.
Project: "Using #BigData and #AI to Dynamically Predict flood risk"
Other interests:
• Anything computer sciencey
• Playing #piano @ ~grade 4/5 ish
• #parkour
• Video game + music / art
• Anything #SliceOfLife
• #cats
• #opensource
• More I can't remember right now