Somehow it’s been almost 2 months since an update, so much for weeklyish!
With Forza Horizon 5 approaching the end of its lifecycle, there’s still a few bits and pieces being released (like Horizon Realms on Apr 25th!). This included a ~50-60 hour grind to Level 1000 in the Hide & Seek mode, so I shared some tips. Luckily it’s fairly relaxed, so I watched plenty of films alongside!
I reviewed a batch of 3 android games I enjoyed in early March (Tumblewords, Mystery Digger, Arranger).
Aaaand 3 more Android games I played through in late March (I’m still on Idle Space Force!).
The UK government introduced a way to verify your identity for Companies House, so I gave it a runthrough to see how it worked. It was surprisingly high quality!
I use Cloudflare for a few things, and continue to be impressed with their transparency and detailed explanations when they encounter problems such as the Feb 6th outage. It’s drastically different to the standard “Oops we had downtime”, and transforms a bad experience into a learning opportunity.
The internet was very different in the late 90s / early 00s, and there’s a collection of this chaotic period in the “Bad and Ugly Websites” category on Web Design Museum. They’re not bad or ugly, they’re just unique!
[Bracket City] is an excellent daily word game, the first one I’ve actually enjoyed. Essentially you’re solving clues, then the answer to that clue forms the next clue. It’s very frustrating yet satisfying, with the only downside being the occasional US-specific answer.
Despite being a fan of Alex Horne (of Taskmaster), and vaguely Tim Key, I’d never watched Alex, Tim, and Mark Watson’s “No More Jockeys”. It’s very covid-vibe, being almost entirely over video calls, yet the chaotic comedy is absolutely amazing. It’s a great example of “shitshow comedy” that I’ve professed love for.
The French game developer “Aymeri” is making a web game per month, and Nov 24’s “WikiMachine” is a great little incremental. It won’t take more than hour or so, and despite taking a while to get going, is a novel concept. Essentially you’re manually & automatically consuming all of Wikipedia, using the articles of your choice.
I watched Robot Wars a LOT as a kid, and still have old home recorded VCRs of it, toys, etc. After an urge to rewatch the 2016-2018 reboot, I found it available on “Mech+”, that apparently uses the subscriptions to fund new shows. Very cool.
A large cause of the long delay since the last post is becoming hopelessly addicted to Fallout: New Vegas (with the Vanilla+ Viva New Vegas mod pack), now easily one of my favourite games of all-time that I somehow “bounced off” the first time I played it ~15 years ago. It’s extremely rare I truly get “into” a game, and this was probably the first since Skyrim in 2011. The mod pack fixes literally hundreds of bugs, restores content, and just makes the game better, as evidenced when talking to friends about it and realising how much I took for granted isn’t in the base game!
As an example, just one of those 100+ mods adds a comedic number of options / fixes, many of them absurdly obvious things like:
remove the hardcoded 1 second of black screen after entering all interiors
show the time remaining beside temporary effects in the Stats Menu
And, one that was so, so essential after a large gunfight that I can’t imagine not using it:
shows recently killed NPCs on the compass until they have been moused over
I’ll probably write an article about it eventually, since I put in 100+ hours across 2 playthroughs between Feb 14th and Mar 4th, averaging around 5.5 hours a day (including workdays). Oops. I actually ended up uninstalling it for my own sanity, a couple of hours in Fallout 4 luckily hasn’t had anywhere near the same effect.
If you’re interested, I apparently took ~130 screenshots, and have 54/72 achievements. Yes, I will absolutely be going back for those 18 remaining achievements.
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