I started playing Cozy Grove today (through Apple Arcade, although for non-Mac platforms it’s on Steam) and I really like it 🥰 They’ve made an interesting choice to limit how much you can do each day – after a while you stop getting new quests, characters run out of new dialogue, and so on. I know when I was playing Littlewood, I would sometimes play it for hours because it had such a compulsive loop. This game feels similar, except for the loop fizzing out after 1½ hours or so. It makes it harder to, y’know, lose sleep cos you just couldn’t put down your game 😌

Another thing I’ve found is that they had to change a joke when localising the game, because the concept of “crowdfunding basic healthcare” doesn’t translate well outside the US. Apparently the game has a satisfying left-wing bent overall. I think I can see myself happily dipping in and out of Cozy Grove for a while.

Hello all, I have made an incredible discovery! Someone has ported the game of my childhood, Extreme Tux Racer, to macOS, iOS and Android. The App Store version costs A$1.49, and Google Play A$1.39, which is such a token amount to support development. I’m actually so excited 🥲

Recently I found, and started playing, Melvor Idle. I’d been looking for a game I could play mindlessly while listening to documentaries or podcasts (I seem too fidgety to just listen and do nothing else, and if I do something more “active” like scroll social media I focus on what I’m reading and don’t listen 😂). This game hasn’t been too bad – as an idle RPG you can just leave it farming when you have better shit to do, and choose a more micromanagey task like combat when you need something to zone out with. Is it the most enthralling game ever? No. Indeed, if they even jazzed it up with a bit more flavour text, I think that would go a long way to making it feel more satisfying. But “enthralling” is not the niche I was looking to fill, and for what I wanted it for, it’s been fine.

So here’s a neat online game: The Royal Game of Ur is a FOSS implementation of a game first played in the ancient city of Ur in the third millennium BCE. Gameboards and a Babylonian tablet with the rules were re-discovered a century ago. Fun time-waster 🙂

Yesterday I discovered this amazing free(mium) browser game, AI Dungeon. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a text-based RPG, but the game text is generated on the fly by an AI. It offers a fair amount of customisability – you can add text in “world info” and “remember” for the AI to keep in memory, like the lore and setting you want to play with. I had a lot of fun with it last night – we’re talking laughter loud enough that Viv asked me what happened from three rooms away (where he was trying to sleep, oops). If you like text-based RPGs or CYOAs this is one to play around with.

Considering I’m notoriously bad at platformers and I died on the tutorial like 10 times, I feel proud that on my first actual run of Spelunky HD I made it all the way to level 1–2 😂️

We played the family edition of Cards Against Humanity yesterday, and tbh I like it better than the “grown-up” edition. Too many of the “grown-up” cards rely on shock value and aren’t actually funny… the family edition’s full of toilet humour but at least most is actually funny 😂