I joined my first Twitter Spaces uh….hangout…chat…thing…space(?) the other night, hosted by Stefan Natter, talking about Roam Research and how powerful a tool it is for unlocking all sorts of potential, and helping focus and creativity. One comment made by George Silverman of MindSkills echoed some thoughts of my own lately, about the sheer volume of information to which we’re exposed on a daily basis, and the mental capacity of our brains to process this.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve recently rebuilt the site, moving away from Wordpress to the static site generator Hugo.

There’s a long-running belief in both the video game and movie industries, which is that films based on games (and usually vice versa) just don’t work. Yet many video games are extremely deep, story-driven experiences with a wealth of material from which to draw inspiration. So where does it keep going wrong?

So, 2020 is over. What a weird year. The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the globe, impacting everyone in different ways. While some claim it’s a hoax, others have cut off all human contact. Personally, I’ve been in a fortunate position and it’s not been too bad, and I’ve managed to keep playing games, including taking in some good new titles and the launch of the new console generation. It seems like lately the only posts I actually get round to are these “best of” ones! As with previous years, these are only titles I’ve personally played, and only covers Xbox, with a couple of non-demanding PC games thrown in for good measure. Also, personal opinion only of course, happy to hear what others have enjoyed via the comments below.

A couple of weeks ago TrueAchievements published #MyDecadeOnXbox, a nice infographic for each user detailing the highlights of their achievements over the last ten years. This prompted a massive surge in registrations for the site as people scrambled to get their own infographic from TA. And honestly, who doesn’t love an infographic? In this post I (once again) take a quick walk down memory lane and pull out some personal highlights from my own summary.

Surely not another “games of the decade” post, I hear you moan? Yep, absolutely. Everyone’s been doing these, so why not me? For no particular reason other than to organise my own thoughts and take a nice trip down memory lane, here they are. I’m not saying these are necessarily the best (everyone will have an opinion), just the ones I’ve personally enjoyed the most. Also Xbox only, since I really only play on Xbox:

It’s good to be able to have a laugh at yourself from time to time. It keeps you humble. I was left scratching my head earlier when this site and another I host started throwing back 504 status codes. This blog’s just for kicks, it’s not monetised and I’m happy using cheap hosting as there’s nothing mission critical. As such there’s no auto-scaling or high availability in place, so if it goes down, it’s down until I fix it.

What does a pirate say on their eightieth birthday? “I’m eighty” (“aye, matey”….geddit?)

Ahem, having picked up Xbox Game Pass a couple of months ago, I finally decided to give Sea Of Thieves a shot. I played some of the beta over a year ago and quite enjoyed it, but was running solo, so didn’t get the full experience and filed it away under “might get to it at some point”. Some of the DoD Storm crew have been playing pretty regularly and raving about it, so I thought I’d jump in and give it another shot.