pedanther

. The reading challenge for April was a book with "Little" or "Big" in the title. I had intended to combine it with my Chandler reading and use The Little Sister, but that's the one Chandler novel I don't own a copy of and I put off going to the library too long, so when I did I found that the library's one copy was out and there wasn't enough month left to wait for it.

So instead I grabbed the first available thing with a suitable title out of my bookmarks on Overdrive, which turned out to be A Little More, a collection of poems and essays by the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott. I remember her recurring guest appearances on Good News Week (translation for British readers: more or less the Australian version of Have I Got News For You), where she showed a wicked sense of humour hiding within a demure little old lady, but didn't know much about her actual writing. I'm enjoying getting acquainted with it.

The challenge for May is a book with a direction in the title.


. While I was putting off looking for The Little Sister, I read Stolen Skies, the new third novel of Tim Powers's current contemporary fantasy series. I have mixed feelings about it. The premise is intriguing, but three books is the longest he's ever stuck with one setting and set of protagonists, and I'm not convinced it's working; some of the situations are starting to get repetitive, and having generic government agencies as the antagonists is damping down his flair for memorable villains. Part of me wishes that he'd stopped at book two, which ended in a way that would have worked as a satisfying conclusion, and done this premise with a new set of characters. At the same time, since book three does exist, I find myself hoping that he has a fourth book planned; that's partly because the end of book three doesn't work as a satisfying end to the series, and partly because I remember that I wasn't so keen on book one until book two came out and showed where things were going, and I'm hoping he'll repeat the trick with books three and four.


. I also read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White this month, because I saw it when I was in the library and remembered that I'd been meaning to read it some time. I now understand completely why everyone I know who's read it is so impressed with Marian Halcombe.


. I've been getting back into playing Invisible, Inc lately, and trying to get the hang of the Expert Plus difficulty setting, which is required for three of the four achievements I still hadn't ticked off. Expert Plus difficulty, apart from various incremental tweaks like having more guards in each level, requires some mental rewiring because it takes away one of the key tools available in the lower difficulties. In the lower difficulties, if you can see a part of the room you can see if it's visible to a guard or security camera, but in Expert Plus difficulty you have to be able to see the guard or camera to be able to determine which parts of the room they can see; which is more realistic, but makes entering a new room a much dicier proposition requiring much peering around of corners.


. I mentioned a while back that I've been watching the reaction channel Marie-Clare's World as Marie-Clare works her way through Doctor Who. Back when I last mentioned it, I believe, she was still mostly relying on physical video media, but since then she's switched to streaming it on Britbox. One of the ways this makes a difference is that she's made a habit of avoiding learning the story titles in advance, since now she can just hit the "next episode" button without needing to know what the next episode is called, and also covers her eyes when the title comes up at the beginning of the first episode of each story. That way she gets to watch each story even more spoiler-free than even most of the people who watched it when it first aired. Occasionally this has dramatic results, such as when she recently watched "The Five Doctors" with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into and got increasingly emotional as it became apparent what was happening.

1. I'm still playing Invisible, Inc, which is now my most-played Steam game with 289 hours on record. I'm currently trying to get the achievement for finishing the story mode on Expert with the rewind function (which lets you take back a turn that goes badly) switched off. That's been a struggle, because I'm the kind of player who thinks it's boring to carefully think through every possible consequence of a move before making it, and so at least once per game I do something ill-advised that lands me in a heap of trouble that makes me wish I still had the rewind function. I'm getting better at thinking my way out of trouble, though.

(And I now have a save slot devoted to preserving the time I almost got the achievement: If you could load it up, you'd see it's the final mission, and all the agents are gathered around the final macguffin, though one of them's unconscious and only made it because one of his colleagues dragged his body halfway across the level, dodging guards the whole time. All that needs to be done to finish the game is switch on the macguffin. The catch is there's only one agent who has the ability to switch on the macguffin, and it's Mr Unconscious. The game apparently hasn't been programmed to recognise this as an unwinnable state, and the final mission can only be ended by winning or by everybody dying, and I refuse to send the rest of the agents out to get killed just to resolve the stand-off, so I guess they're just going to be holed up in that office forever...)


2. My next-most-played Steam game is Star Realms, with 219 hours on record. (After that there's a steep drop of nearly 140 hours to the next on the list.) Star Realms is the electronic edition of a deck-building card game that I've only played once in real life. Players each have their own separate deck representing spaceships and starbases, with various abilities to attack, defend, or trade for better spaceships and starbases to add to the deck. The games are short and the basic concept simple enough that I often fire it up when I have a few minutes to kill -- and then I usually lose, because the strategy is deep enough that I can't reliably win unless I'm really paying attention and not just looking for distraction.


3. Much further down the list, but climbing with some rapidity, is Armello. It's an interesting game; I got it in a Board Game Bundle and it's designed like the electronic edition of a real board game, complete with movement hexes and simulated dice pools and skill cards, but as far as I know it was created as a computer game first and there's never been a physical edition. I'm not sure there could be; there are a lot of stats and random events that the computer is keeping track of in the background that somebody would have to be juggling in a physical game.

The aim of the game is to overthrow the corrupt king holed up in the fortress at the centre of the board -- which keeps throwing me, because that seems to me like a premise for a co-operative game, and the box art shows the player characters standing in a group surrounded by perils, but in fact it's a fully competitive game; the aim is not just to be rid of the old king but to make sure that one's own character is chosen as his successor. I still find it weirdly disconcerting every time another player acts in a particularly looking-out-for-number-one way, or every time I'm reminded that there's just no mechanism for giving other characters a hand even when they're nominally from the same clan as one's own character. And I don't know if it's because of that, or something else, but I find myself skimming over most of the flavour text in the game, picking out the bits that affect the game mechanics but not interested in the story it's trying to tell. But I'm finding the game mechanics interesting enough that I keep coming back to it.


4. I saw videos of people playing Apex Legends and thought it might be fun to try, and "free" is a difficult price to argue with, so I downloaded a copy. Unfortunately, it turns out my computer doesn't have the graphical power to run it properly. (It's not a new computer, and also I deliberately went with the cheap option for the graphics card specifically because I don't usually play this kind of game.) The first bad sign was when it couldn't even play the title graphic without stopping to think about it. Then it struggled all the way through the tutorial even with all the graphics settings dialled way down; after I turned the graphics settings down even further the tutorial ran all right but then I tried the game proper and it crashed. So I think I'm going to have to let it pass.

I had a good day on my birthday. I went on my first Parkrun (although the way I'm doing it, it's more of a Parkbriskwalk), did the washing up, played a lot of Invisible, Inc., and watched the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie with the Mark Watches commentary running in another window.
( Read more... )