The Professional Gamer - January 25, 2016
/This has been another pretty great week. I've again been able to spend a fair amount of time dedicated to the more trivial pursuits of life. Which means that I'll have a bit more to talk about this week compared to what I might otherwise have. Read on to find out how I spent that time.
My viewing time this week was dominated by watching all but the last episode of One Punch Man. The series has been so much fun. It's a real breath of fresh air among the moe serials and overserious cast-of-thousands fighting series that have dominated the air-waves lately. I only have one episode left to watch, and I'm kinda dragging my feet about it. Mostly because I don't want the series to end, but also because I'm an older anime fan and have seen so many serials fizzle at the end. Here's hoping that One Punch Man stays strong to the end.
After I finished writing my article last week, I spent the remainder of the evening playing Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. The game is a few years old, and I originally purchased it sometime after it was released on Steam in North America. I had mostly forgotten about it, but decided to reinstall it on a whim. I played for a few hours that night and a few more hours over the next few days. In the beginning it was fun, but I feel on the cusp of a very long grind to get through the rest of the game, and that has somewhat turned me off of the whole thing.
I also finally had enough time to get a few decent sessions in with Elite: Dangerous. I hadn't played for a long time, largely because it is the type of game that I want to dedicate a relatively large block of time to at once. For the last few months, I haven't felt that I had the appropriate amount of time to dedicate to it. Man, I love this game a lot, but sometimes death can be swift and arbitrary. This is largely due to the NPC archetype commonly referred to as the "psychopath". Basically, these are folks who will kill you just for fun. They never ask for your credits or cargo or anything like that. They just pull you out of lightspeed travel and start hammering your ship with everything they have. At least insurance costs for my ship are not too punishing at my level of play. It's a little frustrating sometimes, but from what I can gather in the community this is considered a "feature" and an "essential part of the tone" of the game. I'm not sure that I agree with that, and I may go back to working the relatively safe career of the merchant.
I'm still reading Ways to the West, but I am now more than half-way through the book. The current chapter is especially interesting to me because the discussion not only centers around Denver, but on the exact area of my current commute: the Southeast Corridor. I've been enthralled learning about the history that has lead to an everyday feature of my own life. I should be finished with the book in time to discuss it more completely in a fortnight. So you should look forward to that in the future.
I'm going to finish off this week with a couple of fun links. Elysium Adventures is a Denver based firm that organizes wilderness adventure trips with a fantasy theme. Think of those urban team building exercises, except out in the wilderness of Colorado, and you can pretend to be an elf without fear of judgement. Finding Molly is a new webcomic that is being published by Emet Comics. The comic is brand new, but looks really promising.
I hope you all have fun this week and I'll see you back here again next time. Game on!
One Punch Man
Recetter
Elite Dangerous