February 2016

Legacy Family Woes

stargrace February 11, 2016 No Comments

Last night I decided to relax with a little Sims 4 – and play my legacy family, the “Little’s”. When we left off, Emily was about to age to a young adult, and Jessica was quickly approaching elder status. Yep, my legacy family is still only on the 2nd generation. The “goal” is to reach the 10th. I’ve never made it past the 2nd before, I normally start a new family or I lose my save or something happens to the family. In the screenshot above you can see deceased Alonzo hanging out, having dinner with his wife. Even in death the Little’s are nothing if not persistent.

Emily got a job as a hungry artist. She spends a lot of time covered in paint. Jessica is still writing novels, but she’s contemplating retiring. Emily also has a boyfriend, but the relationship is a bit awkward because he’s not a young adult yet, he’s still a teenager. It means they’re restricted to hugs and watching TV together. She may have to move on to someone more her own age before too long. I’m hoping to see him age up.

I grew frustrated with their house yesterday so I removed the important items (Alonzo’s urn, Emily’s birth certificate) and I demolished the lot, then re-built something I enjoyed more. The rules of the legacy family state that they have to live on the same lot the entire time, but it’s perfectly fine for you to build and re-build the place. After all, families grow with time.

Besides work, neither Little has much free time. I know there are vacation days, but I rarely take them. I haven’t explored much outside of the lot, but I know with more game time that will change. Especially as the family amasses more money and it becomes less of a requirement to work. If I ever make it to that point.

The Sims 4 is still one of those games that I can play for hours and discover new things all of the time. Plus, it’s entertaining. Both Emily and Jessica had franks and beans as a dinner and the entire evening was filled with odious clouds of green toots that they would then waft towards each other, while giggling.

Sometimes, this game emulates real life just a little too much.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

Field Photographer

stargrace February 10, 2016 No Comments

When World of Warcraft came out with the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera, of course I thought it was one of the weirdest gimmicks added to the game in a long time. Your character poses as though they’re taking a picture of themselves, and you get to choose from a number of filters before taking the shot. There’s even an achievement for doing this in various locations, and that’s what I’ve been working on lately. You get the title “Field Photographer” if you complete them all.

When I talk about “other things to do” in an MMO – this is exactly what I mean. Sure, it’s fun to go around defeating the evil creatures of the world, but sometimes you just want to play the game and relax while doing it. Sometimes that means crafting, harvesting, doing houses (not in WoW), or flying around getting updates for random achievements that offer very little ‘progression’ to your character. These little advancements are what keep me gaming when I’m done my dailies, and they’re essential to my gameplay.

I believe I only have one or two more locations to hit before I’ve completed them all. I’ve posted all of the screenshots in an album over on Google Plus for anyone who wants to take a peek.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

An Age of Games

stargrace February 9, 2016 1 Comment

These days there is not only choice about what sort of games we want to play, but also where we want to play those games. “Gamers” are no longer designated to just two locations, the couch (console gamers) or the PC. Now we can play games on our tablets, phones, and even our watches. How do you know what game you want to play? How do you decide what to try out next?

A lot of it comes from word of mouth. Other games we learn about on various platforms like the AppStore or Google Play. Sometimes you stumble into a hidden gem while exploring the various options available. A lot of games are free to play, making it easy to “try before you buy” and the only thing you have to invest from the outset is a bit of your time.

RTS, (known as real time strategy games) have only grown in popularity as gaming has become mainstream. In one such game you play as Lord of Stormfall and you have to raise your castle by gathering resources. As you grow stronger in power, you battle other rivals and defeat them. You can spend real life money on sapphires to purchase in-game perks like boosting resource production. There are even tutorials and guides so that you don’t get lost along the way, and a helpful wiki. You learn how to be flexible with your resources so that you’re able to adapt to each of the situations on the battlefield. In this way your army continues to evolve, and that’s how you rise in power.

When you start the tutorial you’re instantly brought into the game by the voice over explaining the basics through the tutorial. You’re told to start farming so that you can produce food for your army, and as you complete each task you’ll earn sapphires and other resources like gold and iron. Exploring around as your farm and mine are being built will show you that there are also daily login rewards. After you’ve got a few buildings you’ll be headed to your first battle, and if you’ve been paying attention to the tutorial you’ll emerge victorious! If not, don’t worry, you can keep building up your castle and try again.

The game has a lot to it and was quite a bit more involved than what I was expecting, which was a fantastic surprise. If you’re interested in trying it out or just want more information, you can find it here.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

Collecting (steam) Games

stargrace February 4, 2016 3 Comments

This post is motivated from a conversation I had on twitter yesterday where one person was surprised that collecting games on steam was a thing. Sometimes I forget that we’re not all steam game players – there’s also the Origin game client, battlenet client, other clients I haven’t named, and then of course there’s console games. Even though I own 233 steam games I don’t consider myself a ‘collector’ of them because I don’t actively seek games out. They tend to be simple humble bundles, or games from good sales. At what point would I consider myself a collector? I’m not sure. If I went just by sheer number of games then sure, I suppose 233 is more than enough to qualify – but I don’t *feel* like a collector of steam games.

Looking over my stats was a bit of a surprise. 60% of the games I own I’ve never played. I think a lot of people who acquire steam games can probably say the same thing. We buy them and we either never play them or we play them for incredibly limited amounts of time. Why does this happen? Well, lets face it, our time is precious. If we’re not completely sold on a game and we bought it on a whim or it came bundled with another game, we may not have that urge and motivation to log in when we only have an hour here and there. Why would we want to play something we’ve barely even heard of when our comfort game is waiting just over there.

It’s much harder to get me to try something I’ve never heard of before or that I’m uncertain about. That’s not to say that these games are not also amazing to play, I have no doubt that they are, but convincing me takes some time. Then there’s the obligation we may feel to play MMOs that currently require a subscription. What about all of those early access games that we buy thinking “I’ll play it when it fully releases, this game looks awesome and has so much potential!” only that game never gets out of the early access stage and years later it’s still sitting in your steam library. Yep. I have a few of those sitting around too.

One thing I don’t do is feel bad about collecting games, even games I’ve never played. I think collecting things is human nature. Comic books, baseball cards, art, rocks, whatever. These are our hobbies, and we invest in them. Some hobbies grow in value over time – and some don’t. I don’t expect that my steam account will be “worth” anything if I were to pass on but I do know that getting a neat game makes me smile, and playing those games and discovering them can take me away from a pretty crummy day and brighten things up. Berating ourselves for getting a treat of any sort is a common practice. I think these treats are essential to our well being. Of course I do mean in realistic terms here, obviously if you have no source of income and you’re spending food money on video games there’s a problem – but if you’re working hard and want a game – even a game you may not play for long – that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Of course I do have a goal to try to play more of my steam games, especially those I’ve never played before. Just need more hours in a day.

Knitting Yarn

Sock Madness Forever

stargrace February 4, 2016 No Comments

One of the most satisfying things I ever knit was my first pair of socks. Then the second pair of socks, and the first sock to my third pair. They can be customized so many ways, with so many different parts, it’s a great way to learn new techniques. Once you’ve made one sock the “parts” of a sock rarely change. How you decide to knit them will. There’s a cuff, a leg, a heel, sometimes a gusset, a foot, and a toe. You can knit them cuff down, toe up, two at a time, add beads, zippers, lace.. the sky really is the limit to these versatile items.

That’s how I found myself looking into the ‘Sock Madness Forever‘ group on Ravelry. Their group details read:

Sock Madness is an international sock knitting competition based loosely on the basketball competition known as March Madness. There are 7 rounds of patterns. The first pattern is reasonably straightforward and as the rounds progress the socks become increasingly more complex in design.

Every registered competitor who completes a pair of socks in round 1 will be placed on a team with approximately 40 players per team. It is announced ahead of each round how many will proceed to the next pattern/round. By the 7th pattern there will be one member from each team left to battle it out.

I decided to sign up – and I’m incredibly excited. I know I’m still a new knitter, and I may not be as fast as others on the team, but I’ve put those details into my registration email and hopefully I get sorted appropriately. There are so many members that it can be hard to catch a lot of the chatter, but I am not going to let that deter me. I believe this is the 10th year that the competition has taken place, and that is pretty amazing. There’s already a ‘warm up sock’ pattern posted, a sock called ‘Mad Mix‘ and it’s supposed to look like a hot mess, using up bits and pieces of other sock yarns. I haven’t decided if I’ll warm up using this sock pattern yet, as I do have a few other WIP I’d like to complete, but we’ll see. The group also has quite a few rules, but they really help out when it comes to the competition.

This week I’ve also started my first adventures into spinning yarn from fiber, but that’s a post for another day!

Legacy Family Woes

Field Photographer

An Age of Games

Collecting (steam) Games

Sock Madness Forever

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