the website of faehnrich
I love bookmarking web pages. Like, a lot. I've been bookmarking pages for over two decades, since I got my own PC and a good internet connection in college. My browser started to slow down with one thousand bookmarks. It was noticibly slower with two thousand. Three thousand bookmarks made it nearly unusable. It crashed at four thousand. I then moved to an online bookmarking service. I've since…
The independent tech journalists at 404 Media are having an issue being discoverable on the internet. The Hairpin is now an AI clickbait farm. The big social media sites no longer show you what you want to follow. Google search results are garbage . Meanwhile there's the selfhosted fediverse, the indie web , people are going to private group chats or texts. I'm on a private mailing list and IRC…
Update 2024-02-02: You may notice if you go to the Hillyan News site, it now looks like it did when it first came out 20 years ago. And you may have heard that there's a 20th anniversary edition of Beyond Good and Evil coming out soon. Keep a look out for more details ;) But I'm moving my SAVE HILLYS site here to preserve what was there for a short time and to still have the code generator…
Welcome to this twelfth day of Christmas, you can take your decorations down. Today's game post is a quick one because the game didn't get much play time. Actually two games. I started up Age of Wonders III, but it asked to register which I refused and it wouldn't let me play. I'm pretty sure there's a single player mode. When those servers go down this game will be dead. So I moved on to AI War:…
The game for today is Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders. It's a point-and-click mystery where you play Hercule Poirot and solve mysteries by investigating crime scenes, interigating people, and thinking about clues. You investigate scenes by moving the mouse over certain things. Sometimes you manipulate objects that are puzzles to solve. Interigating people involves choosing what to say. You can…
Today's game is AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAA!!! for the Awesome. It's a base jumping game, you jump off a building, try not to hit other buildings but get close for points, then safely land at a certain place for more points. I think that's about it. There's different courses to jump and I'm sure there's other goals and things to try, but only so much you can do because the game is just jumping off a…
Today's game is 80 Days, a narrative game based on the classic Jules Verne novel. In the game you're going around the world and have to manage things like your time, your finances, luggage, and have to impress your rich boss. I didn't like having to choose things like do I buy a bottle of wine in Paris, or explore around which takes more time. Money is tight so you can buy things to sell later,…
Today's game was a weird one. It's 7 Grand Steps. The UI looks like one of those old mechanical coin-op games, but the gameplay is more like a board game. You interact with it by putting tokens into slots, you get more tokens from a token return slot, and dialog messages popup as pieces of paper that come out of a paper slot like an old fortune telling machine. The game is you're a man in the…
Happy 2024! The first game of the year is also the first from the unplayed games in my Steam library. Today it's 2064: Read Only Memories. It's a point-and-click adventure with a cyberpunk theme but is more bright and cheerful. It's along the lines of classic point-and-click with a good amount of exposition, pixel hunting, and figuring out what items to use on what. It reminds me of another recent…
Welcome to the last game and blog post of the year. Today's game is Arise: A Simple Story on the Nintendo Switch. The description calls it "an emotional journey" of "love and loss". It looked interesting and was only a couple bucks. It's a 3D platformer where the main mechanic is changing time so that ice forms to create bridges or melts to raise water level, or in another level to have the sun…
Another day, another video game. Today's is The Almost Gone on the Nintendo Switch. The game starts up saying it's best played with headphones and has themes that some players may find disturbing so you know you're in for something atmospheric. It's a point-and-click adventure game. Pretty standard, story is told by clicking around and looking at stuff, collect things and solve puzzles. It has a…
The game I have that I'm playing for the first time for today is the Boomerang Fu demo for the Switch. It's a fun little party game where you and other players are little food with boomerangs and can throw or swing to try to hit the other players. There's environmental hazards and power ups. Pretty standard party game but I can see how it'd be fun. My current game right now is Watch Dogs 2 which I…
Today's game is Elli on the Switch. I don't even remember getting this one, but must have gotten it for a few bucks. It's a pretty basic 3D platformer. The animations for cut scenes are not the best, but the gameplay is good. There's your platformer basics of platforms to jump to that disapear when you land on them, some puzzles, collectibles and secrets. You have life hearts but the little time I…
Today's game is Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, I got it on sale for the Switch. It's the same characters and world and style, except it's mainly a 2D sidescroll platformer, with a top view platformer overworld. There's a lot to collect, and secrets to find, so I would say this isn't so much a sequel as it is its own game. Like the last one how it's a good N64 style game, I see this one as…
Today's game is Yooka-Laylee on the Switch. It's a 3D platformer trying to be similar to Banjo-Kazooie on the N64. The gameplay is similar, you control two characters with one on the other, the name Yooka-Laylee a reference to ukelele a reference to Banjo. In the game there's something called the Novelizer 64, a reference to the N64. But thankfully it doesn't try to have the same lower quality…
Merry Christmas! Today's game is Traumatarium on the Switch. This is a game that tries to be as much of a Gameboy game as possible. The main menu is even a virtual room in the 90s with a PC on a desk and the game and Gameboy on it and you play it by putting it in the Gameboy. The game really does look like you're playing on a Gameboy (that's lit up well). You can change the background, and change…