Daniel Keast

I actually played Cyberpunk 2077 at release on the PS4. It was hastily removed from the PlayStation Store after it became apparent just how broken the game was. The game would crash, people would fall through the floor, assets wouldn’t load, cars would randomly veer off the road, along with countless other problems. It didn’t bother me, in fact I found the whole thing hilarious. I guess it helped that I didn’t actually buy the game, I got my copy via a rental service, Boomerang Rentals. I didn’t complete it in this state, I didn’t even complete the prologue. I liked the atmosphere, and the art, but it didn’t seem like the game was for me, even if it was fixed.

This is an extremely simple meal, but it’s packed with nutrition. Lots of vegetables and good fats. The ingredients listed are for 2 portions, but it’s easy enough to scale to what’s needed. It’ll keep well in the fridge for a week or so.

This DLC for Cyberpunk is huge, if it wasn’t so knitted into the story and map of the base game then it really could be its own stand-alone release. It is set in a section of the Night City map, called Dogtown, that is locked off until you start these missions.

This is a rhythm game for the Nintendo Switch. Other than maybe five minutes of the original Game Boy Advance game 20 years ago I’ve not played any entry in this series before. I think it must be made by some of the same developers as the WarioWare games, the graphical style is so similar and the gameplay has some obvious parallels. There is a lot of charm and joy in this game, it’s bright and colourful, and the music is infectious.

I’ve got 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 activates 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 episode, 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 try out writing music or creating textures when that isn’t usually your role seems like it would have a lot of benefits. Especially when modern games development means you spend time hyperfocusing 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 called Dawn of the Machine as a free update to the Nightdive remaster. 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, however, no one is there to greet you, and a quake causes you to lose 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 editor that was installed on the machines. 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 letdown. 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.