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Firewatch

30th December 2016 0 Comments

This game is beautiful. I could leave the review at that and it would almost be enough – the star player is the environment (of course, as you barely see another human for the duration of the game) with its crisp colours, sunset-illuminated vistas, and its unforgiving paths. That said, there’s beauty in the script too, with an introduction that crushes your feelings to a pulp before you do anything but click a few times and a constant warm dialogue between the protaganist and the co-worker in the neighbouring tower. I felt the pacing was perfect – any time it was getting a little dull or samey, you’d get a wisecrack over the radio. Walking around and exploring never felt overwhelming but never felt too constricted either. This was helped by the map (THE MAP!). I really love this game’s map – it feels like part of the game in ways that other game maps just can’t seem to grasp. Whereas most games have either a tiny always-present minimap or a map you can only access via a pause menu, Firewatch gives you a physical map that your character scribbles all over. This gives it a personality that other game…
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Brewing an Irish Red Ale – Bottling Day

16th November 2016 0 Comments

After two weeks in the fermenter, it was time to bottle the Irish Red Ale. My checklist is below. Bottling Workflow: Wash the following with standard detergent Bottling bucket Siphon tube Filling tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Thermometer 500ml bottles (31) Wash the following using VWP Filling tube Siphon tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Trial jar (tall pint glass in this case) Hydrometer Thermometer Bottling bucket 500ml bottles (31) Assemble bottling bucket Attach tubing to fermenter spigot Have waste bucket to hand to catch waste from tap [Brewer’s Friend brewing calculator states that 19L of beer at 20 degrees requires 105.5g of Table Sugar to bring dissolved CO2 to 2.25 volumes.] Measure 105g of Table Sugar and boil in 400ml of water Add to bottling bucket and allow to cool Remove airlock from fermenter Draw off beer sample for hydrometer reading into sanitised trial jar Measure temperature of sample [16 degrees C] Take hydrometer reading [1.012] Add sample to bottling bucket to avoid waste Add remainder of beer from fermenter via siphon – avoid agitation Seal bottling bucket and attach filling stick to spigot Rinse all bottles with water to remove VWP For each bottle: Fill to top using filling stick Cap…
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Brewing an Irish Red Ale – Brew day

31st October 2016 0 Comments

The ingredients from my ingredient shopping arrived really quickly – I placed the order on Thursday at 17:30 and they arrived on Saturday. Impressive work from The Homebrew Company! I put together the workflow below and printed it out so I’d have something to follow along with on brew day. It really helped pinpoint things to focus on and times when I’d be able to prepare the next step while waiting for target temperatures. I had a setback in preparing for brew day, however, as I managed to drop my hydrometer and sample tube – the only two glass pieces of brewing paraphenalia! Needless to say, both of them shattered. Thankfully, I was able to borrow a hydrometer off my friend Diarmaid. I used a tall pint glass as a sample tube, but ended up having a lot of wasted liquid while doing so, I’ll have to be conservative about checking my specific gravity until I source a new one. I tweaked the recipe slightly according to the style guidance from Brewer’s Friend, which should hopefully compensate for my extra dark barley. Other than that, the brew went off without a hitch! Looking forward to the taste test already! Brew Workflow:…
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Brewing an Irish Red Ale – Ingredient Shopping

27th October 2016 0 Comments

Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now – time for a change! I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…). Having never followed a beer recipe before, I struggled a bit parsing the ingredient list. The °L notation in the recipe after some of the grains was particularly confusing. A quick search of the index informed me that this is “degrees Lovibond”, a scale for measuring the colour of the beer. In the EU, EBC (European Brewing Convention) is used instead, which is 1.97 times the °L value. I did all of my shopping on The Homebrew Company‘s website – they have a big selection and I’ve ordered from them before when doing my extract brew. The grain bill called for an English pale malt extract,…
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Clearing the Backlog #2: Deponia Doomsday & Tower of Guns

23rd October 2016 0 Comments

Since the last entry on the backlog, I’ve sunk a few more hours into Sheltered. It grew on me after a while, with the slog of getting resources being quite gripping. I accidentally overcrowded my shelter and killed half the posse through suffocation though – didn’t realise the oxygen filtration system wouldn’t keep up! An enjoyable game, but think I’ve had my fill of it. Onto the next game… Deponia Doomsday Apparently this is part of a series. Humorous point and click adventure game. Except the humour is horrible. Really cringily bad. The pace of the game is ridiculously slow too – I gave it 29 minutes and couldn’t handle a minute more. Complete waste of time. The Humble Monthly Bundle is letting me down. Tower of Guns Okay, this is more like it – randomly-generated challenging FPS about navigating through a tower filled with robot guns. Very similar mindset to Binding of Isaac with randomised powerup drops throughout and very quick to pick up and play. Just the right amount of humour in the form of ridiculous “backstory” for your character each run – e.g. you’re the grocery delivery boy for an elderly lady who lives on the top…
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Boardgame Night: Codenames & Catan 5-6 Player Expansion

16th October 2016 0 Comments

Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group. In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing – e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too – there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total. The Settlers of Catan was my first “proper” boardgame and I had good fun with it for a…
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Clearing the Backlog #1: Action Henk, Train Valley & Sheltered

15th October 2016 0 Comments

I settled in for a wet Friday evening at home alone and cleared a few games from the list…with mixed results. Some miscellaneous items were on the list that I had actually played, but missed with my inital categorisation – an easy few points gained! Action Henk This was surprisingly fun. I honestly thought it would be awful, going by first impressions from the store page. It’s a pleasantly challenging racing game involving a corpulent action figure who can slide on his bum. You see what I mean about the first impressions now, I hope. The online multiplayer didn’t work so well – I think it has a limited player base – but the single player mode was engaging enough that my 67 minutes in game went by without me noticing it. I didn’t finish the single-player mode, but enjoyed what I played of it. If you like games with a bit of challenge, this might be for you. I won’t be picking it up again in a hurry, but it might be worth trying for the local multiplayer at some point. Train Valley Conversely, I expected to enjoy this, as I usually enjoy management games, but it just didn’t…
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The Game Backlog

14th October 2016 0 Comments

I have quite a large Steam game collection. 231 games. A ludicrous amount of games. As well as the games I’ve anticipated and obsessed over, I have random one-offs that were on sale, games that were included in various bundles, and freebies. Some of the ones I got on sale have been played less than the ones I got for free. I’d go so far as to say that most of the games in my Steam library are unplayed (I then went and checked – not the majority, but a pretty hefty sum: 92 out of 231). This really only hit home recently, as I decided to reorganise the categories in the game library and found myself completely at a loss about certain games. So, I have made a resolution – play them all. Rather than going for my usual standards (Dota 2, Binding of Isaac) and rather than buying anything that’s on my wishlist (Dishonored 2 is coming soon and looks great), I’m going to try out something from the backlog. I’m going to be unforgiving – there’s a lot of them and I know a lot of it is crap filler from bundles. So if an hour of…
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My Computer

26th August 2016 0 Comments

I recently upgraded my computer build, replacing the graphics card, CPU, CPU cooler, RAM, and motherboard (rig details at the bottom of the post). The goal is to be able to hit some high graphics settings in AAA games going forward. So far, it’s working very well, though I haven’t stretched it yet really. I’ve played Arkham Knight without any performance issues, but nothing more current. I’m looking into overclocking, since it’s apparently very feasible with this system. The Asus motherboard has a built-in utility for overclocking, but I’m scared of taking the plunge – I’ll do some more reading before risking exploding my shiny new computer parts. Here’s a build album for your delectation and amusement. PCPartPicker part list: http://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/NMbCLD CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (Purchased For €248.09) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (Purchased For €41.70) Motherboard: Asus Z170-P D3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (Purchased For €104.77) Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (Purchased For €30.58) Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (Purchased For €30.58) Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive (Purchased For €94.49) Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM…
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computing, gaming

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