New Achievements

Test – Blueprint for Tungsten Mining on Vulcanus (Image and string)

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3 Minutes to Midnight

Somewhere in 1940’s America an explosion shatters the night. Everyone wakes up with a jolt. Where are they? Who are they? It turns out that whatever blew up in the desert seems to have done more than just wipe their memories clean.

You can see where this game gets its inspiration, Lucas Arts, Monkey Island, Sierra (all those 1990’s classic adventures). And for a large part it succeeds. Main protagonist Berry is snarky, witty and a danger to all around her. You get to control her through most of the game. About 50-60 percent of the puzzles are logical and solvable.

But then, near the end things get worse. One puzzle kept me halted for days. They designed the game to have multiple solutions, but some are very obscure without a walkthrough. Then there is a long fight sequence that I followed according to the walkthrough but kept failing, without explanation

In the end, I could not complete the game. Most frustrating.

Diablo III is a 2012 action role-playing game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment as the third installment in the Diablo franchise.

Set 20 years after the events of Diablo II, players control one of seven character classes – Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, Monk, Necromancer, Witch Doctor, or Wizard – and are tasked with defeating Diablo.

Starting with the main quest is not advised, but I did it anyway with a Wizard. Played in ‘normal’ I got through to the end with only a few re-tries on the Boss battles. Near the end it was necessary to switch to adventure mode to reach Level 70, the maximum.

This really is a fun game to play. The isometric perspective is fixed, so there is no messing around with swivelling the landscape. The structures and obstacles just melt away to enable vision on the characters.

However, after finished the main game and getting into adventure mode each quest gets to be very similar. And I’m sure I repeated a few.

But still work the price.

Level 70 and completed Campaign with a female magician. It was the default when I tried the demo. Then the purchased game picked up on the demo and I ran with it to the end !

Time has been broken, distorted and has no meaning.

Is it 10pm, 11pm or 2am ?

This is what happens when you play Factorio. One of the best designed games in history (not that times matters – it could be from the future)

Because of this bloody game I stopped reading and posting on a daily basis. That’s been happening since Jan 2016. Almost nine years, 3,288 posts.

Things have to change. Could I stop playing Factorio ?

Of course not !!!

So posts will no longer be daily. And one again, time will be distorted. A post with a December date could have been posted in January. And they could be not in any type of order.

Factorio is a construction and management simulation game developed and published by Czech studio Wube Software.

The game was announced via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2013 and released on 14 August 2020 following a four-year-long early access phase to positive reviews.

The game follows an engineer who crash-lands on an alien planet and must harvest resources and create automated industry to build a rocket; however, as it is a sandbox game, players can continue the game after achieving the end goal.

Did you miss the colonial era ?

A time when strangers just turn up in an undiscovered country and take over ?

Then they strip mine the resources and de-forest the place.

Murder the inhabitants because they don’t look like them. And once the place is a polluted mess, just bugger off, never to be seen again ?

You do ?

Well, welcome to Factorio 

Cities: Skylines is a 2015 city-building game developed by Colossal Order. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation.

This should be better that Sim City. It has a modern interface and better graphics. The interface is the first problem, things swim around like that used in King’s Bounty 2. You can move up/down in and out and side ways. But it’s always too fast. It would be nice to be able to fix the perspective so you weren’t forever dealing  with basic movement.

Then there is the operation. It took me ages to get my head around how the basic services worked.

Was the water supply a well ?.

Why was the only way to treat sewerage to just dump it in the river or sea ?

Eventually I worked out that the water supply and sewer pipes were together in the same trench. Something that should not happen in reality. I did eventually get some buildings going but there was little joy or entertainment , it felt like work.

Overall, a frustrating experience

SimCity 4 is a city-building simulation computer game developed by Maxis. The game was released in January 2003.

I got this to try and as it was cheap. It really looks dated, like it was made in the 1990s. The interface stretches to fit a widescreen monitor.

But overall, a pain to use. Not recommended.