It feels like it suddenly switched, and it went from still being warm in the morning to being chilly enough that I don’t want to walk in shorts at 7. But well, it feels nice to be out walking in though. No longer sweating like a pig all the time is rather nice. On saturday I was over visiting some friends which was nice, playing some cards and talking. Again, like always, we ended up with playing Royal Cassino, which is a nice in between card game, it’s not that complex, but also not completely braindead, alongside with gin rummy, it’s one of my favourites. I’m kind of sad that I never have managed to get into Schnapsen (66) or Skat or some of the card games that people mostly play here, but it is how it is.

Books

I finished of reading Adiron towards the end of last week, and it was a fun book, these in the second series are way longer than the first one, and it really makes a difference for me, it feels like everything is given more time, and you get more time to just enjoy with the characters. Of course that also means that the characters need to be good, but they are in this one. So I’ve been having quite a lot of fun reading.

And I got on with the second one Kaspar and it feels different enough from the first book, and the series in general that it’s not that annoying, this time being a book that mostly takes place on a planet. It does get almost too perilious at times, but it’s been a lot of fun, I still have ~60 pages left of it which I probably will get through tonight, but it seems like I’ve gotten to the winddown and basically a nice little ending to it by now, the danger is over, and we get to spend some nice time with people.

And that’s it for this week, it feels a lot less looking back at it, compared with last week, but then in the end the number of pages are more or less the same at around my normal 700 pages a week. But I’ll rather take some longer books and more fun while reading, than feeling accomplished on a monday morning.

Games

So, I was left with a bit of a extra buffer this week in money, and was thinking I would spend 25€ on myself, so I got into hunting for some platformers, as I have seen that mood been coming in to me, so that’s probably where the next move will go, seeing as I’ve been playing mostly rpgs and puzzle games for a long while now.

First one that I got is Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, I played the first one, but haven’t quite gotten through it yet, it was nice though, just that it was getting a bit too hard, and the map was kind of confusing for me. This one seems to have fixed those things at least, and I’ve been playing a bit of the beginning of it, and it feels like a solid metroidvania, with slow thoughtful fights. Lots of dodging, so far at least it feels like it will be a lot of fun.

I also got Megaman Zero / ZX Collection I have tried playing some of these games on my miyoo, as emulated games, but they are so hard, this collection though feels great, there are some things that makes it a lot more reasonable for me to get to play it, they added checkpoints, quite a few to the levels, so that I don’t have to play through all of the stage before getting a new try at the boss, and they let me remap buttons to something that is a bit more comfortable to play with. I’ve been making my way through the first of the games, and while it’s still hard, it feels doable. I have made my way through about half of the bosses, and it feels great, it’s that nice feeling of something that feels frustrating and not really doable, and then you slowly start dancing, getting around things, and then on try number 10-40 finally I get to take it down. I’m also enjoying the story more than I remember doing the last time, it’s just nice helping a scrappy gang of resistance fighters. And there is 5 other games in the collection as well, so I’m looking forward to having a good time with them, the first one is supposed to be the hardest, from what I’ve heard at least, so if I can get through that one, chances are great that I will have a chance at the others as well. There is something really nice about the colourful GBA graphics, and seeing how much they managed to get out of that old system is really fun, very enjoyable one for sure.

And the last of the ones I got in my haul was Shakedown: Hawaii it was really cheap, and reminds me of the older original top down GTA games, it feels really close too, with the driving and so on. I haven’t played it that much yet, but so far it just feels kind of right. And having a little chaos simulator with a silly little story that makes me smile is worth the price of a cup of coffee.

Apart from those mostly this week I’ve been just doing Picross puzzles, this week mostly through Logic Pic which is basically just a normal picross game, some of the puzzles are quite tricky, some of them are near trivial, and it’s something that is fun to sit and have fun with.

Other

I’m slowly getting there with my podcasts, I’m now finally down on a more normal 26 ish episodes in wait, and a lot of good ones that I’m looking forward to listening to as well, I also got to put in some more backlog episodes, which is always kind of nice, I’ve been wanting some more into the aether to listen to, because it fits my mood, but having 40+ episodes in my queue for so long has made it unfeasible to add more. Now I have some in my queue, and it makes me feel happy. Also only about a week back in episodes, which makes me quite happy in that regard.

I was having quite a lot of just walking around listening to podcasts this weekend, which was fun. All in all, a quite nice week for me. Now that another one is starting, let’s see how things will be in this one.