Daniel Keast

I’ve gotten back to Dawn of the Machine after getting stuck, and then deciding to play through every other official Quake 1 level set. This one was released recently by MachineGames for the 30th anniversary of the original game, and it’s very hard. You start the game with a reduced maximum health and ammunition for each of the weapons. There are pickups throughout the levels that will bump these up a little bit. Several of them are well hidden, I doubt I got half of them to be honest. Several of the levels took me around half an hour to beat, and had over 200 enemies in them. They will regularly spawn the hardest enemies in the game one after the other, often in places where it is extremely hard to dodge their attacks.

I haven’t managed to finish the last few picks for the book club. Last month’s was The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which had overly flowery prose and never managed to get to any point. That was a real disappointment since I remember liking Frankenstein very much. The month before was Wool by Hugh Howey which also felt very poorly written. It feels good to finally finish one again.

This is the second Quake expansion created by MachineGames, released in 2021. In this one there are five short episodes with a central hub that you keep returning to. Each episode is two levels long, and is activating part of a giant machine in the hub level. After this there is a final boss level where you once again fight Chthon, the lava beast from the original game’s first episode.

Dissolution of Eternity is the second mission pack for the original Quake. This one has two episodes, and after the first one I thought it was pretty boring. The new weapons were just overpowered versions of the originals and the levels weren’t doing anything as interesting as mission pack 1.

Dimension of the Past is a short expansion to the original Quake. It was released in 2016 by MachineGames to celebrate the base game’s 20th birthday. They apparently have an internal group called Quake Club that get together to create free new levels using a level editor called TrenchBroom. This seems like such an unusual thing for a large games company to do, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Getting a chance to refresh your skills on the absolute basics of level design, or even try out creating music or textures sounds great. Especially when modern games development means you spend time hyper focusing on one tiny detail in a giant project for years without much control. I suspect it’s a lot of fun as well.

Scourge of Armagon is the first mission pack for the original Quake. It features some new enemies and a few new weapons. Most are not particularly interesting such as a laser gun or a ball that floats towards you and explodes. You do get Mjolnir though, a giant hammer that causes lightning to hit your enemies. That one can be a lot of fun. There is a gremlin enemy as well that can steal your active weapon, or spawn more of itself by eating the corpses which litter the level. That’s a very interesting idea for an enemy, but they’re so weak that I never really saw either happen.

It is the 30th anniversary of the release of Quake. To celebrate this MachineGames released a new set of levels for free as an update to the NightDive remaster called Dawn of the Machine. I thought I’d give them a go and found them excellent but extremely hard. That seemed like a good reason to go back to the original levels and play a few to practice. Instead I ended up completing the entire game for the first time in probably decades.

This is a new single-player game by Capcom. It’s a science fiction story in which you are a member of a team visiting a base on the moon. On arrival no one is there to greet you however, and a quake causes the death of the rest of your team. You encounter a small girl, and when you then start getting attacked by robots it turns out that she is one also and is able to hack them to help you.

This is a stand-alone novel in the Discworld series, set in a country called Borogravia. In it a teenage girl, Polly, cuts her hair short and joins the army in an attempt to find out what has happened to her elder brother who enlisted the year before. The country is ruled by a Duchess that no one has seen for many years, and who would be extremely old by now. They have been attacking their neighbours and starting wars for as long as people can remember, and now it seems like it is catching up to them.

I’ve used the Vim text editor for over twenty years. When I was a system administrator managing Linux servers it was the tool available to me for editing files on them. For a long time I didn’t really understand how to use it properly, I was just able to make simple edits and had learned how to save and quit. Over the years I started picking up little tricks here and there, using the dot key, moving through paragraphs, changing the contents of parentheses. It wasn’t until I read the first edition of this book that it really clicked and I understood the mindset of using this editor.

I found the first sequel to Dune to be a big let down. The majority of the book is people just explaining the plot to each other, with most of the characters behaving nothing like they did in the first book. I get that a lot of this is intentional, Paul is frozen by destiny, he is unable to make any choice at all because he is trying to avoid disasters he is foreseeing. The disasters are actually happening though, billions are dying in a jihad.

This is the first game I played on my new Steam Machine. It’s the new game by Yacht Club, the team which created Shovel Knight. In it you play as a mouse called Mina who arrives at the start of the game by ship to an island where she had previously built generators that provide electricity to the inhabitants. These generators have broken down, and she plans to go to each and fix them.

This is the fourth Dizzy adventure, and the first that wasn’t created by the original developers, The Oliver Twins. This one introduces a health bar, you no longer die instantly when touching hazards. The coins from the previous games have been replaced by diamonds, and they restore some of your health when you collect them. Other than that this game is very similar to the previous entry. Perhaps it is because of the hand-off to a new developer, maybe they didn’t feel like they could take any large risks. Maybe it’s just that the series had found its footing in the previous game and there were no major issues to fix like the snorkel in 2, or the backtracking in the original.

Dune is a classic science fiction book from 1965. It tells the story of Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto. Their family is taking control of the planet Arrakis near the start of the novel. Due to an arrangement with the emperor, the Baron Harkonnen who currently rules the planet is handing it over. It is clear to everyone involved that this is a trap, and that they cannot be trusted. The opportunity is too great to pass up however, and the first section of the book is detailing the training that Paul receives and planning the move.

This is the third adventure game in the Dizzy series, and one of my favourite games growing up. I loved the feel of this adventure, of exploring what felt like a huge world filled with dragons and trolls.