the geek year 2018

05/01/2019

2018 was an intense year personally

We moved house and renovated the new place substantially. For a month or so we were living out of a single room, no kitchen or bathroom, and boarded up windows. The place is awesome now, although still a few more things we would like to update, but that can be done over time.

We have fibre! 900 MB download speed, this has changed my online experience, and it makes more media available

So because of this, and having a toddler in the house, I haven’t had as much time to spend gaming as I once did… plus I’m studying more Machine Learning and Python in the evenings. 2018 was probably the year where I spent the least on games too; as I’ve kept mentioning I’m trying to complete the games I’ve purchased… the hard copies of anyway.

In 2018 I’ve not been updating this blog as frequently as I’d like to, although I’ve been making smaller contributions to twitter @GamerGeekNews. I’ve met some really cool, clever, intelligent, passionate, and talented individuals on Twitter, people I now consider friends. I migrated and reformatted this blog to Digital Ocean from my old host, just ‘cos speed… although I will fix the https certificate too that’s freely available.

I also updated the scripts that feed my tweets from a variety of RSS feeds and retweet hashtags. The result of which is that I’m the top influencer for PowerBI, and Number 2 for Tableau… although this is just the result of an algorithm and I don’t take this seriously. I will look to publish the code this year to github, as currently it’s sitting of my raspberry pi, & if it did go tits up it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lost all data from one of the machines. Currently receiving over 1 million impressions over 28 days, maxed out at 1.2 earlier in the year. This in turn then pushes more traffic to this shitty blog… need to create more useful interesting content, or recruit more contributors. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in 2019

twitter creds jan2019
twitter creds jan2019

I can play a few more tunes of the acoustic guitar, far from Slash, although I do now know a few Star Wars songs 🙂

I’ve recently started playing Elite:Dangerous again, now my games room is usable, and nearly fully decorated.

What did I play and complete:

Horizon Zero Dawn – this was an awesome epic tale, great story voice acting and script
Dark Souls iii – enjoyed this heaps, I want to know more of the story, will maybe continue to play, although I do have Dark Souls ii to finish
Bloodborne – Dark Souls iii was good, but this made me git gud. Brutal difficulty and bloody combat, and thanks to the community (as with DS iii) for helping me get to the end and love the experience
Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition – My favourite main Blanka is back; although he doesn’t seem the same tier as Street Fighter IV, still fun to play
Overwatch – I’ve played in a couple of full seasons and have swapped out my main; staying with support I’ve ditched Mercy who I’ve played from launch to the boop master Lucio… each game is a pleasure
Shadow of the Colossus – finally I completed this epic; emotional eye candy with novel puzzles
Doom Ever since I picked up my first PC I’ve been playing Doom, and this iteration kicks arse. Bethesda have taken a first person shooter and made it even more fun and fast paced, really nice work and easy to lose yourself to the simple game play and banging heavy metal music.
The Last Guardian – the spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus, great plot to say it’s without a direct narration. Cool once I got the hang of controlling Trico, and another slap in the feels ending.

2018 Game of the Year

For me must be Red Dead Redemption 2. Not all of the reviews I’ve read have been positive, but for me it was a cool relaxing pastime; like watching cricket. The difficulty level was perfect to be entertaining; a tough enough challenge to be engaging, but it never felt like a grind, anything that was repetitive was optional. The characters and story were deep enough, in a similar fashion to Assassin’s Creed; I accepted the artistic license, and didn’t regard it as an history lesson

Special mention – I’m a long time Charlie Brooker fan from his Guardian column, and have enjoyed each of Netflix’s Black Mirror episodes, but the multiple choice options of Bandersnatch blew my mind, I was really impressed… this could be influenced by the the small dose of LSD I’d taken earlier in the day, by as much as my childhood love of Fighting Fantasy books, that were my introduction to fantasy and Role Play Games. Love that this technology is viable, and am looking forward to introducing my son to the more kiddy friendly programs that use it

Looking forward to 2019… although the only game I’m excited about is Cyberpunk 2077 and not sure if it’ll be released this year, or on this generation of consoles?