gamerdad I’m reluctantly optimistic that my first year on this farm will be productive. During the tutorial the game encouraged me to plant for crops of canola. I did. And now in later November with the threat of snow just one game cycle away, I’m not sure the canola will do much more than wilt in the field.

I hate to be nitpicking but this is just one of the little details in the game that could use some work from the developers.

About 32 hours into my save I’ve encountered a lot of great things, but a few other not so great features. The driving AI for example is laughably bad at navigating the town. If—big if—it accepts my request to drive from point A to a carefully selected point B often just roughly in the vicinity of where I need it to go—if—if—about half the time it will crash into a bridge railing, get hung up on a fence, or try to drive through an arch for which fitting would be an optimistic dream.

I get the little message—or don’t get any message—and drop what i’m doing to go supervise.

Ugh. Is like a management job or something.

gamerdad Another sick day and yet another day on the couch exploring the land of Skyrim. This one may almost think from looking at my screenshots today that I was in full on tourist mode.

In fact, I worked thru a good chunk of the opening act, made it all the way to a second major city, and bought myself a home in the first one. Even so, there were a lot of pretty sights along the way.

The last time I played this game was on the Nintendo Switch, a lesser console but very portable. And even that was an update from my first play thrus on PC and PS3. I knew there had been upgrades applied for current generation consoles, but while a lot of the little things blend in I do think the spectacular landscape showcases the improvements from that effort.

I’ve written this here before but I’m not a graphics-first guy. I will play graphically inferior games without hesitation if the gameplay is good. So, while a lot of folks lose their minds over frame rates and resolutions and such, those things are more of my cherry on top.

Even so, everyone loves a cherry. And between slaying rogue wolves and picking potion ingredients and sneaking up on bandit camps, it’s nice to get a great view too.

gamerdad In an effort to balance out some of the farming simulator stimulation I have been bouncing between the world of Skyrim for what I am going to call my sixth official attempt to play this game. I have made real progress in the past, but have actually never beat the game.

Can it be beat? I mean, does it actually have an end or do you just eventually run out of things to do? I honestly don’t know.

The Special Edition with a bunch of packaged DLC was on a crazy good sale a while back and I couldn’t resist a new attempt. So. Here goes…

gamerdad Ah, so between some sick time on the couch and a few days of I’ve kinda gone a big overboard with this game.

In fact, at just a week since launch I’ve logged a full twenty four hours in game and have made some serious progress in building out my little farm. Should I be proud? Or a bit embarrassed?

The dynamics of the game tweaks that have added some new features to the game, along with a few years of experience playing previous versions, has me digging in and churning through a lot of contracts and expanding my operation. I’ve set some basic rules for my game play and I’ve been trying to avoid cheats or crazy manipulation on the simulation aspect which a lot of people who post online seem to lean into maybe just to make their videos but maybe also to wheel past the slow grind of the agricultural simulation which can be a bit tedious if you don’t multitask and diversify your efforts from the get go.

On the other hand, I’ve also been leaning into the quirkier aspects of the game, like the fact that you can literally kinda sorta go for a trail run through the woods… call me silly but It’s a vibe.

gamerdad Ah, well. Call it a break from farming or whatever but between my efforts of school bus spotting and actually doing the farming bits, I may have accidentally gone for a run.

Backup. Ok. So I’m a runner. In real life. If you are just stumbling on this and looking for a short short bio. I run. It’s my other hobby.

Running is a vibe. All those other games make running look like effortless sprinting, you know? Run in No Man’s Sky for example and your avatar is bounding and striding and galloping It’s not realistic. It’s simply utilitarian and fast.

I didn’t expect much for Farming Simulator 25 but between the nature trails and the bird sounds and the sluggish and basically awkward jog by little Farmer Brad, this game has the vibe. You know. It feels like trail running. It sims it better than most. Call me crazy but there’s something there.

The video started as a gag, a bit, but there’s something there. Really and I had to share it up.

gamerdad I can’t honestly explain why I’m in such a vibing place for this silly game.

I mean, maybe it’s the prospect of a game with low stakes flow, you know? Like, nothing to kill, nothing to evade, nothing to quest, nothing to skill-based reflexively button mash. Just, like, build a farm from scratch and chill.

I rarely #preorder games. What with the whole game industry releasing beta junk and patching later thing that has been going on, and as much as initial reviews are complaining that this is yet another incremental update to the series, that’s kinda what I wanted. The latest version to replace the one in my library that will be going away when my PSPlus subscription deliberately lapses next month.

We were on vacation when this went live, on our way home though, and so I remoted into my PS5 and installed it anyways and then played it using the Remote app on my iPad to push through the #tutorial level—which honestly I didn’t need to play but figured, y’know, just in case something changed that was important enough to put in the tutorial.. gotta play it. The controls via the app are a #pita though so I finished the recap of the skills and I’ll dig in properly when we’re home and in from of my big screen. Until then, here we go…

gamerdad Almost exactly three months after picking up our copy of this game while on a vacation in the mountains, we’re back in the mountains at the same hotel, playing yet another round in our ongoing campaign.

This time the weather is a little cooler and our “romantic village” is as much a distraction from the cold and rain outside as it was a reprieve from a long hike those months back.

That said, as we progress through our campaign we’re starting to get a vibe for the strategy and being a little bit smarter about playing tiles. Our game this evening netted us our best score yet and advanced us along yet score sheet a few extra steps over usual.

gamerdad I keep logging in because I keep seeing news and posts about new content, but when it settles I ultimately just end up spending an hour grinding resources and exploring.

The value of a relaxing game like No Man’s Sky is that after a long day of work or writing it is awfully nice to just run around and not worry about anything but just dabbling and dawdling through a procedurally generated planet never previously seen by human eyes.

It’s been a crazy week at home, at work, and around the world. I needed some chill time so between tending my virtual farm in Farming Simulator and collecting ferrite and salvaged data in the infinite multiverse of No Man’s Sky I’ve needed some down time, offline time, and time to progress in something that is indifferent to the universe being screwed up.

gamerdad Now that I’ve paid my pre-order for the updated version of this game, I’ve been itching to play. But FS22 is still sitting there in my game library (tho only for another couple months) with a save that I’ve got about 20 hours of progress on.

Two play sessions ago I had started a big contract—and I do mean big, like $85k worth of work, which for those in the know is a solid ten hours of simulator grind—and I had made my way about 75% of the way thru whilst listening to an audiobook. And for all the times I’ve left off half way thru game quests in my life, for some reason this hanging contract was nagging me to finish before I moved on from the game in nine days. That, and it was the evening before daylight savings and I needed some motivation to stay up en extra hour and time shift my brain. Three more long his of digging potatoes later, and I was getting asked if I was coming to bed anytime soon—but I got it done and got paid.

As goofy as this game premise is, there is something about farming sims in general that speak to a primal kind of urge to build something into the world and to grow, well, anything. Online, as the release of the new version draws near there are guys lamenting the bittersweet transition: a new game but an old play left behind. They are posting screenshots of their accomplishments and digitally weeping for the change In not quite that far sunk, but I get the vibe. It is something.

gamerdad I realized that the previous version of this sim game was probably one of the last reasons In have been hanging onto my Playstation membership (being the only monthly game giveaway I still play and haven’t purchased outright) so having made the decision to cancel that when it comes up for renewal in January, I put the money instead into pre-ordering the next edition—which comes out in about 2 weeks.

I figured out the general vibe of the game on version ’22 and I think this might be a game I can really see myself sinking into for some casual playtime. Really. I must be getting old huh?

gamerdad What with my first stab at something resembling an actual tabletop RPG last night—and what with the Dungeon Masters Guide (2024) releasing in about two weeks—I figured it was finally time to tiptoe into the first steps of Dungeons & Dragons.

What I had not mentioned was that my Players Manual appeared on our doorstep a month ago, thereabouts, and though I’ve spent some quality time thumbing through it and reading the processes and rules and charts, none of it actually started to make much sense until I did the hard manual printed paper and pen approach to building a character from scratch.

Sure, I’ve got the Beyond app downloaded and sure I eventually messed around and created a second character using that, but as soon as-called-simple as it is to use that tool, I will grant myself the +5 Wisdom that comes from taking the time to puzzle it out from the print edition first, because that app would not have made as much sense before I did that—or maybe—who can say? Either way, I’ve now got a couple of rawly generic characters built that seem like they might be worth putting through some kind of game—if only I knew how to do that.

gamerdad We were a couple people short of a proper crew for a #ttrpg but Chris put on a game of Mansions of Madness for us. The game uses an app-based Dungeon Master to lead a cooperative crew through a mission and solve a mystery that unravels with each turn.