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Whiskers on kittens
The other day, I had a dream that Z and I had adopted an adorable little calico kitten still small enough to fit into your hand. Coincidentally, a few days later we heard that a couple of our friends had adopted a kitten, although you need two hands to hold her. She is also very adorable. We may not have a new kitty, but we are teaching ours to jump through a hula hoop just because. He is not a smart cat, but if he's energetic enough, he'll hop through now! Except when he forgets the idea and tries to go around or bunt the hoop instead. (If he's not energetic enough, he'll high-step through it in a hilariously awkward way.)
I've been reading A City on Mars, which is a book about how going to live in space in large numbers is something we are very much unprepared to do right now on a number of axes and would probably suck in some big ways, and it's very interesting but also makes me want to play Starfield again. So far I haven't opened it back up again, but I have been playing other games.
A couple weekends ago, I had the idea to look up 'Katamari' on the Switch store, because I never had the chance to play the original, and downloaded the demo. I kid you not, it was the fastest I'd ever gone from excitement -> oh wow, this is actively not fun and I want to stop. I didn't even make it through the tutorial because the controls and camera were that incredibly jank. I don't care if the point of the game is to spend hours learning how to control it; I uninstalled it, then bought Untitled Goose Game instead and had a much better time. The ending sequence in particular was a ton of fun, and I never got tired of honking, lol.
I also recently played Chants of Sennaar, a language-themed game inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. I was initially disappointed when it quickly became clear that it was not as similar to Heaven's Vault as I thought it would be, but once I accepted that it was less a learn-the-language game and more of a puzzle game with language as the theme, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, I had a great time - it kept me up too late a couple of nights in a row, and it has a beautiful art style with great use of color and varying perspective that (with one exception for me) managed to never be confusing. And for a puzzle game, it was generally pretty good at keeping the puzzles reasonable and giving the player context to help figure them out; there are stealth sections, which some people didn't seem to like, but those were also puzzles, and I didn't have much issue with them.
I also really liked the theme of connections between humans and cultures bringing joy; the ending scene where it reveals that the diagram of connections between the cultures inspired the glyph for everybody's idea of what was most important to them was especially cool. I also liked how the technology advanced as you climbed the tower, and how the visual inspirations for each language also get more modern, from Mesopotamia to runes to Devanagri to alchemy - and the glyphs themselves visually fancier - until you reach the top level and find the Exiles have a visually very simplified language. It reminded me of how at least in English, you see a lot less fancy script nowadays because we do much more writing and reading with computers or standardized print, and a lot of kids aren't even taught how to write in cursive nowadays because, well, it's not clear what the point is. I also liked how while there was some core vocabulary that you were given in every language, other words varied in accordance to their culture, like how you only get numbers when dealing with the scientists' language.
There were a few things I didn't enjoy. First, there was a lot of time that was spent just getting from place to place if you ever needed to backtrack for anything, to the point where I was pulling out my phone to listen to a podcast because I was getting bored. Second, the game over-encourages some degree of brute-forcing the languages, but I also found some of the pictures in your journal that you are supposed to match glyphs against to be confusing, and in a let's play I watched, that player had the same issue, albeit not always with the same pictures as I did. For example, we both misunderstood the picture for 'make' in the first level, because it shows someone making a pot, and you've just learned the word for 'pot' when you are given that page in the journal.
The top level of the tower as a whole was underbaked. Having a new mechanic for learning words was fun, but it also hands you pretty much the entire language right away as if either the devs were tired of their gameplay loop or thought you would be, there's hardly anyone to talk to or anything to see, and in general you don't get a great sense of what their culture is like compared to the other levels. The whole metaphor that was supposed to go with them also seemed pretty muddled to me. It seemed like 'video games bad' at first, but then more 'overdoing escapism and not talking to people bad', but at the same time they're being held captive by an evil AI? That section could have used more time in development.
The whole ending sequence was very cool, though. Some great visuals and music, and then the last scene is a good reward for making it through the game, because you get a sense that you've changed the whole world of the game for the better by helping people communicate.
I've been reading A City on Mars, which is a book about how going to live in space in large numbers is something we are very much unprepared to do right now on a number of axes and would probably suck in some big ways, and it's very interesting but also makes me want to play Starfield again. So far I haven't opened it back up again, but I have been playing other games.
A couple weekends ago, I had the idea to look up 'Katamari' on the Switch store, because I never had the chance to play the original, and downloaded the demo. I kid you not, it was the fastest I'd ever gone from excitement -> oh wow, this is actively not fun and I want to stop. I didn't even make it through the tutorial because the controls and camera were that incredibly jank. I don't care if the point of the game is to spend hours learning how to control it; I uninstalled it, then bought Untitled Goose Game instead and had a much better time. The ending sequence in particular was a ton of fun, and I never got tired of honking, lol.
I also recently played Chants of Sennaar, a language-themed game inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. I was initially disappointed when it quickly became clear that it was not as similar to Heaven's Vault as I thought it would be, but once I accepted that it was less a learn-the-language game and more of a puzzle game with language as the theme, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, I had a great time - it kept me up too late a couple of nights in a row, and it has a beautiful art style with great use of color and varying perspective that (with one exception for me) managed to never be confusing. And for a puzzle game, it was generally pretty good at keeping the puzzles reasonable and giving the player context to help figure them out; there are stealth sections, which some people didn't seem to like, but those were also puzzles, and I didn't have much issue with them.
I also really liked the theme of connections between humans and cultures bringing joy; the ending scene where it reveals that the diagram of connections between the cultures inspired the glyph for everybody's idea of what was most important to them was especially cool. I also liked how the technology advanced as you climbed the tower, and how the visual inspirations for each language also get more modern, from Mesopotamia to runes to Devanagri to alchemy - and the glyphs themselves visually fancier - until you reach the top level and find the Exiles have a visually very simplified language. It reminded me of how at least in English, you see a lot less fancy script nowadays because we do much more writing and reading with computers or standardized print, and a lot of kids aren't even taught how to write in cursive nowadays because, well, it's not clear what the point is. I also liked how while there was some core vocabulary that you were given in every language, other words varied in accordance to their culture, like how you only get numbers when dealing with the scientists' language.
There were a few things I didn't enjoy. First, there was a lot of time that was spent just getting from place to place if you ever needed to backtrack for anything, to the point where I was pulling out my phone to listen to a podcast because I was getting bored. Second, the game over-encourages some degree of brute-forcing the languages, but I also found some of the pictures in your journal that you are supposed to match glyphs against to be confusing, and in a let's play I watched, that player had the same issue, albeit not always with the same pictures as I did. For example, we both misunderstood the picture for 'make' in the first level, because it shows someone making a pot, and you've just learned the word for 'pot' when you are given that page in the journal.
The top level of the tower as a whole was underbaked. Having a new mechanic for learning words was fun, but it also hands you pretty much the entire language right away as if either the devs were tired of their gameplay loop or thought you would be, there's hardly anyone to talk to or anything to see, and in general you don't get a great sense of what their culture is like compared to the other levels. The whole metaphor that was supposed to go with them also seemed pretty muddled to me. It seemed like 'video games bad' at first, but then more 'overdoing escapism and not talking to people bad', but at the same time they're being held captive by an evil AI? That section could have used more time in development.
The whole ending sequence was very cool, though. Some great visuals and music, and then the last scene is a good reward for making it through the game, because you get a sense that you've changed the whole world of the game for the better by helping people communicate.