2022: A Year in Review

We’re nearly three weeks into 2023 and I am finally ready to review various things that I enjoyed about 2022. If you needed to ever ask “Well, how are things going Justis?” that is about the current status. Let’s see how many of these I get through before I totally lose steam. Or drink too much of this wine I just opened. Or both.

The lists

Well, everything is in multiples of five so I have decided to only produce four lists to really make this uncomfortable in my brain.

[Read More]

2021 Game of the Year

Year Summary

One of the things that stuck out to me was how much I wanted to do the act of “grinding,” where you just do a repetitive task for moderate character improvement, in video games in 2021. It was pretty critical to helping me get through so many dang books and podcasts. I read 56 books in 2021. This was an improvement on almost zero in 2020 and virtually none since college. The repetitive grind was replicated with my domestic life as well where I did a lot of cleaning to get through some of these books. I mopped my whole house twice thanks to Brandon Sanderson. Robin Hobb kept my vacuuming on schedule. I’ve even did some driving around to finish an audio book now and then (“Well, I guess I can drive an hour and half to go get a growler of beer. Sure.”). Anyway, I put together some ordered lists of video games. Here they are.

[Read More]

The Active Reload in Returnal Should Feel Better

I’m only a couple hours into the video game Returnal and I’ve come to a strange realization - The active reload is using the wrong stimuli for how my brain works. Specifically, the noise that comes from the controller, the specific way the controller rumbles, and the information presented on the screen is all wrong for what I find intuitive with a modern video game. Housemarque (the developer of Returnal) should have used the new fancy controller to provide this information in a better way. I want the new controller to bump me when it’s time to press the button.

[Read More]