A beer I brought from Denmark when I wasn’t sure if I’d find any better beer in Denmark.
It’s a good triple. Has a tall head initially, but it dissipated quite quickly. And the taste is smooth and honey-like. Head is light, but quite focused. Better than a lot of Belgian triples I’ve had this year, but not something I’d go looking for in Denmark again.
I’ve heard about coffee getting stale over time. And here I am, returning after 10 days of vacation, and deciding to make a couple of flat whites from the beans I had left in the hopper.
First two shots ran at 3 bar. That’s for a coffee that usually runs at 7-9 bars. Only after purging the coffee, putting the beans from the bag and pulling another shot or two the pressure recovered.
Needless to say, I didn’t feel the need to taste the result of 3-bar coffee.
I love Guy Ritchie as much as the next man. But I must admit that considering how rich his characters often are, they could have benefited from a TV series. Snatch series, I didn’t enjoy much. But Gentlemen are much better.
Main theme is “restrained aggression” common to British culture. Undercurrent of threats that is everywhere: public announcements especially. Another theme is the modern royalty, and where all the money comes from (mostly property rent, actually).
I’ve never read Dredd comics nor have I seen the Stallone movie, so have nothing to compare with.
I vaguely remember this movie wasnt appreciated much when it came out, but with the rise of The Boys, it got re-evaluation.
It is 90s level of brutal, I give it that, flayed bodies and brains scattered all around.
Also, it has a way of depicting drug use, slow mo and bright colours.
Another interesting decision is that Dredd wears the signature helmet, but Rookie doesn’t, because she relies on her psychic powers.
Storywise, this is basically Raid all over again, minus silat. A huge slum building on lockdown trapping two policemen trying to arrest a criminal, all gangs hunting for them.
It’s hard to understand from the screenshots, but it’s actually a 3D point’n’click adventure that makes itself look like 2D.
Gameplay wise, it’s pretty standard: you talk to people, you have your inventory, you can combine stuff.
Storywise, though, it is not so much horror as it is dark comedy. You do standard point’n’click stuff, like trying to prank a barber to get a pile of hair you aren’t even sure you need… And the barber ends up having a heart attack.
The complexity comes not from its puzzles, those are rather logical, I must admit, but from the sheer number of locations and characters that are available almost from the get go. Also you quickly find half a dozen items in your inventory you have a very vague idea where to use. Luckily there’s a decent hints system built in. It’s not 90s anymore.
Lochlea is a distillery that likes to experiment with their cask strength batches. Apparently, Batch 3 is a peated one.
This is Batch 2, which, without me knowing, is sherried. How lucky.
At first sip I was skeptical. But over time, it actually grew on me, and now I consider this whiskey to be good value for money. Oloroso and PX casks at 60% ABV are really brought to life.
Ace Combat is one of my all time favorite series. Enough to say that I got myself a PS2 only to play that game, because emulators, despite all their advantages, can’t deal with its analog controls properly.
But I also have to admit that Ace Combat 4, Ace Combat 5 and Zero are kind of the same game. You fly the same jets, you have just a couple of weapons, and you mostly just shoot missiles at everything.
What varries is how the story is presented. Ace Combat 4 uses anime stills. And the story is not about you, but about your adversary, called Yellow 13. He is viewed through the eyes of a boy, whom he orphaned by accident. The boy works in a pub where the occupier pilots gather. Bartender and his dauther are part of the Resistance, though, and wait for the occupation to end. Despite the dauther being secretly in love with Yellow 13. It is a nice way to tell a story. Contrast this with “in your face” storytelling of Assault Horizon.
One problem I have with the game, though, is that a lot of mission are “earn X points before time ends”. Which means that instead of engaging with mission objectives, you are just caught up in an endless foxfight. That also means you have to resupply once or even twice through the mission.
There are some signature missions, though. When I saw a ravine in Mission 7, I imediattely knew where this was going. And right on queue, and orbital cannon starts to fire at you, and the only way to dodge it is of course to navigate through the ravine.
One of my best purchases ever was Playstation 2 with an Infinity chip that allowed to play burned games. But burning is a hassle, despite the fact I still have a DVD burner and some blank DVDs.
So when I heard that now you can run games directly from a memory card I had to try it. Turns out this isn’t such a new thing. You could run games from memory card for a few years, using MX4SIO. But the newer cards combine both functions of memory card, storing saves, and DVD emulator.
I got the Bitfunx card which is readily available from AliExpress.
It boots fine into Free McBoot. But would get stuck while trying to boot into OPL MMCE, which is how you run games from the SD card.
After some trial and error, I figured out that I need to actually disabled my Infinite chip (hold Start while booting, then restart once).
Diablo Immortal added a new class, Druid. Althouth this one is a classic, both from Diablo 2 and Diablo 4. Still, it’s ironic how Diablo Immortal, salvaging everything from Diablo 3, is still head above most other ARPGs in the tactile sense. Yes, there’s same issue Diablo 3 had, most classes feel kind of the same: basic attack, AoE attack, mobility skill, “rage button”.
But turning into a werewolf and summoning tornadoes still feels great.
Only summoning wolves is a bit lackluster, as they “teleport” too much. I haven’t stopped until I reached Westmarch yet again.
As I was visiting Newcastle, we ended up in a gastropub that had Springbank 10 and 15 on the menu. Of course I had to try one of them out, and since the difference between 10 and 15 was just 5GBP, I went for 15 years old. Paid 17GBP for the priviledge.
It’s a nice whiskey, I can’t deny it. It is smooth, a bit sweet, a bit smokey, and leaves a nice warmth in the throat. It just doesn’t worth 200GBP for a bottle. For contrast, Benromach 21 costs 136GBP.
As I love both Diablo 2/3 and Torchlight 2, I decided to give Torchlight Infinite another try. And it squandered it.
One annoying mechanic is timed boss battles. You have 5 minutes to kill a boss, otherwise, you have to try again. You also have a limited number of retries: around 10, I think. This wasn’t a problem until level 38, when I faced Keegan. This one can kill a character in a couple of hits, and I was barely doing any damage. Managed to kill it after a few tries, but that was a major difficulty spike there out of nowhere.
Then I went to a guide and respected (luckily it’s free), and after that, it was much easier. But it’s not fun to play ARPG that you need a leveling guide for.
So, in the end, out of all mobile Diablo clones, only Diablo Immortal is worth any attention, despite all the hate it got when it released (and probably still gets).
It is clearly inspired by Resident Evil, but doesn’t copy it as much as I thought it would.
The item screen with heartbeat reflecting health and ID are there.
As is the raise weapon mechanic.
But that’s where the differences start, as your camera is not fixed, and neither your aim.
Flashligth and theme park setting are more Silent Hill, though, as is the screen noise filter.
I’ve been meaning to watch this movie after Queen’s Gambit, but like always, everything takes me ages.
They didn’t exactly go for physical resemblance. But Tobey Maguire unhinge game is brilliant.
So is Peter Sarsgaard as candy crushing priest.
There’s a lot of russian language in the movie. The bookstore keeper talks just russian, without subtitles. And so are russian chessplayers. Some are better, some, like Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, worse. Spassky is such a fun character, though, as he’s depicted as this superstar macho.
The Game 3 and Game 6 aren’t explained very well. So I’ll need to find a separate video on them.
And it’s interesting that they tried to attribute Spassky same obsessive behaviors, like Xraying the chair because it made strange sounds or talking to the lightbulb, because KGB is listening.
Instead of experimenting with Belgian beers, which mostly failed, I now decided to experiment with British and American beers.
This one is a solid Imperial Stout, at 13% ABV, almost black and without any head. The distinction is the extra warmth from chillies and the smoky aftertaste. Still sweet, though.
“Ghost” is in reference to “ghost chillies” used in the process. Those chillies grow in Bhutia, North India. “Bhut” in the local language means “ghost”, so the name caugth up.
Completed it in a single sitting.
A two-hour long point’n’click adventure, but with isometric perspective, which is slightly uncharacteristic. Sanitarium did the same, though, and even had same themes of seemingly bizzare world that had some concrete reasonings. Structurally, it reminiscent of “I have no mouth“, as there are three stories that unravel one after the other.
There’s no inventory management, so all you have to do is click the objects in the right order.
First story is pretty straightforward: gay lover meeting a married man in Rome. It does some picture swaps and uncanny music, kind of like Last Door, but nothing fancy.
The second story is much more impressive. It’s about a woman that is going mad from grief and laundaum. At first, it has this effect from We Happy Few, whenever she drinks laundaum the grey world becomes happy and colourful.
But by the end of the story, rooms become half grey, half happy, as she moves through them, which is innovative for a pixelart game.
They also switch the character models for her, and she starts to shamble as she gets more unhinged.
Third story is about black doctor in Chicago that struggles with memories from the First World War and with being accused of stealing morphine, which he did, but only to help his neighbour dying from tuberculosis.
It would be all pretty grim and melancholic, if not for the epilogues, which clearly took inspiration from Grim Fandango.
The evil design continues. In Mission 10 we have a turret that sometimes fires its first shell even before the mission starts, wiping the squad.
In Mission 11, you need to rescue a civilian, but it’s not a civilian, as he will attack and kill you if you get too close.
I managed to get to the 2nd Phase of Mission 12 without dying. But it’s yet another “swim under enemy fire and hope you don’t get hit” monent.
And I feel like I’m done with this game 🫡
I was running Atmosphere 1.7.1 and firmware 17.0.1 Everything was working fine, except Link’s Awakening, which I wanted to play.
I thought that it might be a problem with the NSP I had, so I got the MiG version. Same problem, the game hangs on the Nintendo loading screen.
So I went and updated Atmosphere to 1.9.1. Luckily this is easy, just replace the files. That didn’t help.
I updated firmware to 19.0.1. Needed to remember how to boot into Title Override again (hold R while booting any game), since the applet mode was giving me an error. That allowed me to play Link’s Awakening and any other game on MiG, but all my installed NSP games stopped working.
Went through the motions again. Installed sys-patch, which is again easy, since it’s just replacing some files. That helped. Now everything seems to be working.
I also patched the hosts file and the WiFi connection, in hopes that the console won’t try to download official updates again, as those display annoying message every time you try to launch any game.
Unlocked Forcas in his release event. Supposed to be good, but I didn’t manage to confirm this yet.
Unlocked Lucien from Blessed Scrolls pull. Reddit tells me that I was actually lucky, since Lucius can’t be farmed. All I can say, he’s rather fun, as you can turn on berserk mode, and the guy will be running killing things off by himself.
Unlocked Nauseous Rotbine from Guild War tokens. This one is actually useful, as it’s the only Chaos healer in the game.
Unlocked Aesoth from his release event. One of the easiest unlocks, as it requires just 100 shards.
I’ve been using Bosch green drills for at least 7 years. But after the PSB 1800 combidrill started raising smoke on me, I decided it was time for upgrade.
I wanted to try Bosch Professional GSR FC first, but it wasn’t shipping, so I gave GSB a try, as it was available the next day.
First thing is that the battery system is amazing. After the bulky batteries on PSB, this is tiny battery feels seamless. Although I know the more serious combidrills still have the bulkier battery.
And it’s amazing that GSR is even shorter (both in height and length) than the GSB. Such a tiny and cool device.
Now there’s also GSR HX (yes, the namings are very confusing and not helpful at all), which should be even smaller. But I it is just a screwdriver, not a combidrill.
Completed Disco Elysium for good now.
This time I played the Sensitive cop. Out of the three archetypes, this is the most balanced one, as he has plenty of health and morale. I did pick the Revancholian Nationhood thought, though, that damages your morale when you pick the wrong dialogue options without much benefits. That was a mistake.
This time I tried to avoid cryptozoologists on purpose, get my gun and help with the welkins MMORPG game. Also, turns out when you play as Sensitive Cop, your necktie starts talking to you in a crazy voice.
Then I painted myself into a corner with the Hardie boys. There’s a Logic check that you need to pass to start looking for Ruby. And I failed it. Usually, that’s not a problem, as you can retry the check if you put another point into the skill. But since I’m playing Sensitive Cop, I have just one point in Logic. So I had to wait the entire day doing nothing, in hopes that the communist club plotline will bring me somewhere. It didn’t. I just ended up reloading a very old save.
The only qualm I have with the game is that the ending has less variance than might seem. Titus can survive, Ruby can die, you can arrest Klaasje, and not know anything about phasmid, but still the killer is the same old man on the island which you never met. I can’t say “it’s not a great writing” about a game with greatest writing since ever. But I still feel a bit cheated, just a little bit.