You feel the tug of an unseen hand, pulling you toward something. What that something is, you are unsure. The one thing you do know is that it is immensely powerful—powerful enough to control the creatures of the sea, powerful enough to drive men mad. It calls to you, draws you in, compels you. As the darkness hangs over you and you reflect on the things you have seen, the things you can never unsee, you feel a hollowness inside yourself. You feel empty, as you have always known it would end this way, and you are powerless to stop it.

Hiding behind its 8-bit aesthetic, SKALD: Against the Black Priory from High North Studios AS is a dive into darkness, madness, and Lovecraftian horror. It is a retro-inspired fantasy roleplaying game. In this turn-based game, you start as a simple mercenary on a mission that is dear to you. You venture to the Outer Isles, where you must understand how the isles have been plunged into chaos. After a brief prologue, you wake up on the beach with nothing but a few rags after your ship wrecked, leaving you stranded. The isle of Idra is flush with madmen and mutated creatures who will attempt to rip you to shreds with reckless abandon.

As you navigate the unyielding darkness that surrounds your boat, you make one last effort to grip your sanity and hold off the unstoppable madness breaking through. For you have ventured too far from the safe haven of port, and the night has ensconced you. The lights on your ship have gone dark, you see things that aren’t there, and more terrifying yet, there are things there you cannot see. You race for the safety of Greater Marrow, guided only by the lighthouse, a beacon of sanity, illuminating the sky. You race forward, hoping to arrive with a grain of your sanity remaining, for the light will save you. As you dock your small vessel, you feel the release of the eldritch horrors pulling on the final thread of your mind, you are safe—for now.

DREDGE, by Black Salt Games, may seem like a cozy fishing game on the surface, but very quickly you will learn there is much more to the game. Upon your arrival at Greater Marrow, you are loaned a boat and you must fish to pay off your debt. Once your debt is paid, you continue to fish. When you reel in your first aberrant fish, you begin to feel like something is not right here. The combination of the unsettling tone upon retrieving the fish and the grotesque visuals of the fish itself begin to give you an unsettling feeling. There is more going on here than a simple fishing game.

I am back, and I’ve made a large number of changes and updates to the blog. I wanted to quickly go over the changes and what you can expect to see in terms of content on this site moving forward. First and foremost, you will notice that we have a new look. The old style was fine, it was very simple, and I wanted to keep the same vibe, but have it be a bit more pleasing to the eye. Secondly, I’ve added support for webmentions. This allows better cross-linking with other content creators we link to, and who link to us. This will help create a more connected, platform-agnostic internet. I highly recommend looking into it. I’ve also added more standard features for a blog: you can share links to social media from each article, and there’s a tagging system to make finding related articles easier

I haven’t been streaming nearly as much lately, this is partly due to my life being much busier lately, but secondarily, I am less inclined to use Twitch, since I am actively working to push back against large platforms, and there isn’t one much larger than Amazon. I’ve considered getting back to streaming on Owncast exclusively, but my motivation has been low. I may try to get on more often to support a smaller platform and help it grow. I plan to write a deeper dive on Owncast. while I believe that a decentralized, federated internet is the direction we should be heading, Owncast has a long way to go to become a player against Twitch.

It’s been a few weeks since I last streamed on any of the platforms where I create content. The reason for this is that I’m currently playing Starfield, and Starfield does not run optimally on my PC. However, I am prioritizing playing it despite these issues. As many of you already know, content creation is not my primary source of income; as a result, I can prioritize games I want to play over those I can stream. I’ve encountered two major issues with Starfield since its release. The first is that it causes my graphics card drivers to timeout. Consequently, if I were to stream the game, I would constantly crash in the middle of the stream, resulting in a poor experience for viewers. This is particularly concerning because, supposedly, Starfield was optimized for AMD cards, and I have an AMD card. The second issue is that, for some reason, when I attempted to stream Starfield, it maxed out my CPU, causing dropped frames. Unfortunately, Starfield, while playable, is not suitable for streaming. Despite these issues, I am enjoying the game. I’ve already invested about 50 hours into it, and it’s a solid, enjoyable game. I plan to continue playing it a bit more, but I’m also eager to get back to streaming.

Once I’m done with Starfield, the streams will return. I’m pretty excited to get back to streaming. Right now, I’m starting to get the itch to play Factorio again. This will be my third playthrough, and this time I’m going to look to build some foundational blueprints for future playthroughs. I intend to write a more detailed article about Factorio in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. In my last playthrough, I launched the ship in under forty hours. I suspect this time it will take longer, but I will have a stronger foundation for future games to continue scaling my factories upward. I’m looking forward to this playthrough; it will be the first time I’m focused more on optimizing my builds instead of finishing the game as fast as possible with limited experience.

There are countless chatbots you can use for your Twitch channel. Each of these performs specific tasks very well, but all of them tend to fail at giving the ability to create complex, custom functionality. In my quest to find a chatbot that can integrate with Spotify’s API, I found that creating my own bot was likely the best option, and much easier than expected.

Today we are going to create a chatbot that can be ever vigilant in your channel so your viewers can maximize their experience while watching you play.

I recently discovered Stacklands thanks to everyone’s favorite Irish YouTuber, Francis John, and it has been an absolute delight. In Stacklands, you are tasked with managing a village in a two-dimensional world where each entity within the village is represented by cards. As you progress through the game, you open packs to discover new cards. When stacked, the cards interact with each other; for instance, placing a villager on a tree will yield wood, while a berry bush produces fruit. Building is handled in the same manner—combining wood and stone creates various buildings, from lumberyards to mess halls. The ultimate goal of the game is to continue building your village while equipping your villagers to fend off interlopers emerging from a mysterious portal, a product of combining mysterious artifacts with your temples. The game culminates in a boss battle that tests your level of preparedness and evaluates whether you’ve appropriately transformed your simple villagers into battle-ready warriors.

The beauty of Stacklands lies in its simplicity. The core loop of the game involves gaining cards through pack openings or card combinations. Sokpop employs various methods to create challenges for the player, turning this from a basic village simulator into a relaxing yet highly engaging game. Stacklands spans multiple rounds, referred to as moons. At the end of each moon, you must feed your villagers and sell cards until you reach your maximum card limit. This round-based structure ensures you’re consistently considering multiple aspects, yet the challenges never feel overwhelming. Villager starvation is typically a result of mismanagement rather than the game dealing an unfair hand. The card limit, which can be increased, adds texture to the game. At times, you’re faced with choices between two cards, both of which you were saving to build something. Often, this situation arises from mismanagement on your part, as you might not have foreseen the need for an additional warehouse to expand your card limit.

When The Cycle: Frontier was released into early access, I was filled with excitement. As an avid Escape from Tarkov player, I was eager to find another extraction shooter to immerse myself in. However, despite my initial enthusiasm, I soon discovered that The Cycle lacked some crucial elements that would have made it a truly enjoyable experience. Even in its early stages, I realized that this game was not the right fit for me. The Cycle fell short due to the absence of key elements that were necessary for it to be a quality game which I could continue to go back to. As The Cycle: Frontier was the first casualty in the wave of Extraction Shooters to be released and fail, I feel like I am beating a dead horse writing a post like this, but I never got to hit the horse the first time, so I am taking my shot.

One of the largest issues I had with The Cycle was that there was no headshot mechanic, or at least one that truly leveled the playing field when there was a notable gear difference. I’ve talked about one of the things I love most about Tarkov: that a well-placed headshot can one-tap almost any enemy, and as a result, there is an additional element of skill. The Cycle struggled with this; it always felt that any time I went against another player, whoever had the superior gear would win the engagement. There was no element of skill to turn the fight; it was simply predetermined based on who brought the better armor. The rush of killing someone who clearly had better armor because you got the jump and landed the headshot was second to none. The Cycle simply did not have that.

Many adventurous programmers have examined the pricing of rare items in Path of Exile, and their thoughts turned to machine learning. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. Machine learning is designed to assess predictable outcomes, but due to the nature of trading in Path of Exile, the outcomes are unpredictable. In this article, I intend to explore several reasons why machine learning in Path of Exile is not feasible.

Machine Learning involves understanding how specific inputs correspond to particular outputs, and in the context of selling items, the desired output is the sale itself. When developers delve into the realm of ML to solve pricing in Path of Exile, they often believe they are trying to determine a fixed price. However, this perception is not entirely accurate; they are actually seeking to determine the highest price at which an item will sell. This distinction is subtle but crucial. It is incorrect to expect the model to generate a price as an output based solely on inputs, such as 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = price. ML is more adept at measuring outcomes, particularly binary outcomes. What you should aim to achieve is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + price = sale.

For over twenty years, I have been immersed in the world of Magic. Although my approach to the game has evolved over time, Magic has been a constant presence throughout my adult life. However, recently, Magic: The Gathering Arena has left a bitter taste in my mouth. It’s not just Hasbro’s relentless pursuit of profit and excessive card releasing that bothers me. While I could separate the company’s actions from the game itself, I find myself unable to endure the combination of Arena and rampant capitalism. Please understand that my grievances are personal, and if you enjoy playing Magic: The Gathering: A Deckmaster Game, I have no intention of convincing you otherwise.

The beauty of Magic used to lie in the nearly infinite possibilities of card combinations, which allowed for unique and captivating interactions. While Arena still offers this, there is a persistent issue: the meta consistently condenses into a narrow selection of 4-6 decks that are optimized for winning. Facing White Lifegain deck after deck becomes tiresome. Since Arena matches are blind, the strategy is to use a performant deck against the most commonly encountered opponents. Consequently, we end up with a limited pool of ultra-optimized decks that dominate the meta. For me, the joy of the game resided in exploration and deck building. I fondly recall spending hours researching cards to include in my janky deck, striving to overcome my friend’s janky deck that had defeated me for weeks. In my view, Arena lacks the most important and enjoyable aspect of Magic—the local meta. A local meta refers to a small, ever-changing collection of decks within a confined environment, which makes deck creation more intriguing and enjoyable.