The Professional Gamer - February 2, 2019

Hello and welcome to another post with me, Jim. This week has been pretty good for me. I mean, I was trying to fight off a sinus infection and ended up going to the doctor to get some help with it. I mean, I’ve still run about 12 miles this week, so its not like I was doing that bad. But, I just want to nip any problem like that in the bud before it becomes more serious. Especially since I’m running a half-marathon this weekend. And attending an all day meeting. So, I’m pretty much not going to do anything geeky and worth talking about over the weekend. Anyways, what geeky things have I been doing? Read on to find out.

I’m still working on exploring space in Elite: Dangerous, and am currently about a third of the way between the core inhabited systems and the Colonia area. I’m basically searching for non-sequence stars, and using them as guideposts. Mostly because, I want to be able to turn in data for things that are more interesting than another medium-sized yellow-white star. That’s been fun, and I’m really enjoying the new exploration methods. The Full System Scan is great, and a lot better than having to fly around the system to map everything. If I want to get more detail on planet, you do the detailed surface scan. Although I’m still doing similar tasks in every system, they feel less routine and tedious because of the type of interaction. It is going to be a long time yet for me to get to Colonia, but I’m going to try to find some cool stuff on the way.

Other than that, I’ve ended up watching a lot of YouTube stuff lately. I enjoyed Lindsey Ellis’s discussion of Independence Day versus War of the Worlds. She brought up some interesting points about why the two films are different, in terms of the social environment that surrounded the production of each, and some ways that Independence Day was more successful as a film, even if its kinda cheesy and goofy. I highly recommend watching it.

Other than that, I’ve spent a little time watching Crystal play Dragon Quest XI. At this point she has more that half of her team assembled again. She just has two more member to search for. But, in true large game style, she’s moved on to trying to complete every side quest first. Which is ok. It’s just a weird issue to have with games where you tend to go in long increments playing the main quest, then into a large time period working on the side quests. Maybe a little reminder to balance things a little more as you progress through the game. Like, “Hey player, the reward from this quest is only marginally useful now. Maybe go and do it before there is no point to complete the quest.” I could have used that in Skyrim.

That’s about it though. Like I said, I’m busy this entire weekend, but I’m hoping that I can find some time to do some fun stuff again during the week. See you next time, and game on!