“An anonymous young man unleashes a campaign of vengeance against the corrupt leaders who murdered his mother and continue to systemically victimize the poor and powerless.”
An Indian John Wick, starring Dev Patel and produced by Jordan Peele. Count me in.
Factorio
People who have played Factorio already know; this game will take over your life. In a good way.
An incredible gaming experience that the whole family enjoyed. Planning factories with my wife and kid was so fun. This is a game where even when I wasn’t playing it I was thinking about it constantly.
Played: With wife and kiddo
Completed: No. We didn’t launch the rocket, but we did get the Spidertron.
Stars: 5/5
Doom Eternal
I was super let down by this. I loved the original Doom (2016) and was really looking forward to playing this one… but it got repetitive really quickly. Music is great, but I can listen to that on YouTube.
Played: Alone
Completed: No
Stars: 1/5
Stray
Passable cat simulation game. Mostly doesn’t take advantage of the cool graphics and interesting premise.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 2/5
Red Dead Redemption 2
Didn’t last long with this one. Traveling by horse isn’t super fun.
Played: Alone
Completed: No
Stars: 2/5
Metroid Prime Remastered
I’m a huge Metroid fan, and have very fond memories of the Prime series in particular. This remake was a blast, and it was really nice getting to share it with my son.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 4/5
Cult of the Lamb
This was a great way to introduce my eight year old to dangerous religious terms like “cult” and “sacrifice” and “sermon”. Super fun gameplay loop. Stopped playing right before the final boss encounter - I definitely need to go back and finish this one off.
Played: With wife and kiddo
Completed: Almost!
Stars: 3/5
Tears of the Kingdom
Game of the Year for me. A towering achievement for video games. Insanely fun, and somehow manages to improve on Breath of the Wild in every way. Wow.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 5/5
Torchlight 3
Not my jam but Connor is liking this one a lot. Which means he’s primed to really enjoy better dungeon crawler games in the future. Which makes me happy.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: No
Stars: 2/5
FZero 99
This shit is so my jam. 2 minute races against 98 other online players. Classic retro gameplay. Addictive as hell.
Played: Mostly alone
Completed: n/a
Stars: 4/5
Cocoon
Beautiful and mind bending. Pretty easy, but some of the puzzles require a little bit of outside the box thinking.
Played: With kiddo and brother
Completed: Yes
Stars: 3/5
Super Mario Bros Wonder
Played through the coop mode with my son, beat the game, and then never had any interest in going back and collecting all the things. Incredibly inventive, but it felt like no level idea was truly used to its full potential. Needed to be more difficult.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 3/5
Dave the Diver
Super cool idea but I fell off hard. Would love to go back to this one some day and give it its due.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: No
Stars: 2/5
Suika Game
Maybe the best $2 I spent all year. For a week of my life all I wanted to do was combine fruits into watermelons.
Played: With wife and kiddo
Completed: n/a
Stars: 4/5
Super Mario RPG Remake
Another blast from my past, it was incredibly special getting to play this one with my son. The core gameplay and story are so fun, and the quality of life additions they made are super nice.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 4/5
No Man’s Sky
I’ve just barely made it out of the tutorial. More than anything it really just makes me want to play Minecraft.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: No
Stars: 2/5
Pikmin 4
I’m playing this one with Connor and he doesn’t like that his role in the game is just shooting pebbles at things. Really wish the campaign let two people play as characters that can control Pikmins like Pikmin 3.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: No
Stars: 3/5
Dicey Dungeons
Not bad, but absolutely did not capture my attention. I “made it through” the dungeon with my first character, and then learned that the game wants me to do the same thing with different characters which didn’t sound appealing.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: No
Stars: 1/5
Outer Wilds
Still playing this one, and it’s absolutely incredible. No Man’s Sky generates new galaxies for you which is an amazing technical feat but is pretty boring in practice. Outer Wilds has a bespoke crafted and designed solar system to explore where every inch of it is perfect. So many mysteries to figure out.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Not yet
Stars: 4/5
God of War Ragnarok
God of War might be my favorite game series of all time. I saw this was on sale for 50% off and snatched it right up. I’m just getting started, but I’m really excited to give this more time.
Played: Alone
Completed: Not yet
Stars: 3/5
It Takes Two
It Takes Two features a completely unhinged story where a husband and wife are going to get divorced before getting transformed into dolls and are taken on an adventure by a well-meaning but abusive book. Every stage introduces a new gameplay element that gets discarded as soon as the next stage starts. Requires two players. I can’t believe that a game like this even exists.
Played: With kiddo
Completed: Yes
Stars: 3/5
I turned 40 last week.
It’s a big number. One that is sometimes hard for people, but I feel pretty good about it. More than anything else, it’s given me an opportunity to reflect on my life a little bit more than any of my past birthdays.
I have an amazing wife, and she and I have built a wonderful home together over the 14 years that we’ve been married. We have an incredible son who has filled my life with indescribable joy every single day for the last 7 years.
I have so so many friends and family that I love and who love me in return.
I have a career that I find challenging and fulfilling where I get to work with immensely talented people building kickass software. I consider pretty much every person I work with a close friend.
I’ve been able to travel a lot, and have seen much of the world.
I have my health, and spend a lot of time and energy focusing on my fitness. I’m probably in the best overall shape of my life.
I have hobbies that I love. I play guitar almost every day, and play disc golf whenever possible. I have enough free time to watch a good amount of movies and TV shows, and play video games.
So yeah. I’m feeling pretty good about 40.
Overcooked is a cooperative cooking game where you and a couple teammates must work together to prepare basic meals. You get a higher score if you prepare more meals, and each level is a little different in terms of kitchen layout etc.
It is an amazing game if:
1. You have other people to play with.
and
2. You’re confident that everybody can handle the white-hot rage that will happen when one of your teammates doesn’t chop onions fast enough.
Cindy, Connor, and I have been playing this game off and on for the past couple of weeks and have nearly completed the main story. It’s definitely gotten testy at times (Connor thinks it’s really funny to grab the fire extinguisher and spin around in circles) but the times that we’ve really worked together and communicated well to complete a difficult challenge have felt absolutely incredible.
Portal 2 is one of my all time favorite video games. I played it in 2011 when it was first released, and every couple of years I’ll go back and beat it again from start to finish. It never gets old.
My last play through was about three years ago. Connor watched, but he was only four at the time, and he doesn’t remember it at all, so when I started playing it again recently, it was a completely fresh experience for him. He loved it, and definitely caught on to a lot more of the humor this time around. He loves Gladdos turning into a potato, and Cave Johnson getting angry about lemons.
Portal 2 also has a local cooperative “two player campaign” that’s separate from the main story. Each player controls a different robot character, and you have to work together to solve levels and complete a story that is completely self contained.
And even though I love Portal 2, I’ve never played through the two player campaign.
Until now.
After completing the single player campaign this time around, I asked Connor if he’d like to give two player mode a try. I knew that he had played enough Minecraft to handle the controls, and I knew that he had watched me play enough to understand how portals work. But I didn’t know that he would be so dang good at the game. In no time at all he was responding to directions, performing some pretty difficult timing-based platforming, and actually helping me reason through the sometimes mind-melting puzzles the game gave us.
Over the course of the next week or two, Connor and I were actually able to beat the Portal 2 cooperative experience. It’s the first game that we’ve beat together, I couldn’t be more proud of how well he did, and I’ve gotten to experience an entirely new part of one of my all time favorite games because of him.
It’s definitely one of the most special video game experiences I’ve ever had and it’s a memory that I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life.
Valve released the Portal Companion Collection for Nintendo Switch recently, and since I’ll take any excuse to replay Portal I did just that. This marks the 3rd time that Connor and I have played through Portal since the start of the pandemic.
Everything about this game is incredible. I’ve beaten it enough at this point to knock out the main story in about 2 hours, but every minute of that play through is pure enjoyment. The main portal game mechanic is still fun. The way that the game introduces you to new portal mechanics that it later asks you to build on is a master class in game design. The writing is maybe the best in any video game ever.
This play through, Connor asked me to avoid any and all Rattman rooms because they were too creepy for him. And some of the turret encounters were a bit much for him and he had to cover his eyes. But he started to pick up a lot on the game’s humor which made me really happy.
Portal is a masterpiece. And I can’t wait to play through Portal 2 again, which is even better.
The original release date for Top Gun: Maverick was July 2019 before production delays and a pandemic pushed everything back. It’s now May 2022 and what can I say other than it was completely worth the wait. Man, what a movie.
Dope poster. Dope movie.
QuickAnchors is a library that helps iOS developers write UIKit layout code more easily. With QuickAnchors you are able to add subviews and set up constraints in a single line of code, with a compact syntax that is easy to write and clear to read.
I wrote QuickAnchors because I was tired of all the boilerplate that’s required with programmatic UIKit layouts. At this point, I’ve used QuickAnchors in multiple projects and feel comfortable making it available for public use.
With QuickAnchors, instead of writing code that looks like this:
someView.addSubview(anotherView)
NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
anotherView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: someView.topAnchor, constant: 50),
anotherView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: someView.leadingAnchor, constant: 20),
anotherView.heightAnchor.constraint(equalToConstant: 100)
])You instead write something like this:
someView.quickAdd(anotherView, [
topToTop(50),
leadingToLeading(20),
heightToConstant(100)
])Or this:
someView.quickAdd(anotherView, [ 50, 20, nil, nil ], [ heightToConstant(100) ])
Behind the scenes, the quickAdd function creates normal programmatic NSLayoutConstraints. This means that layouts can easily be expressed with any combination of QuickAnchors and normal old NSLayoutConstraint objects.
I’ve never released a package or library meant for public use before, but you can read all about the different ways you can use QuickAnchors on the repo’s readme. I’m also planning on writing some example blog posts and sample projects for QuickAnchors in the coming weeks and months.
Every spring when the weather finally turns warm in Michigan, I think of this story.
Back when I was in high school, my friend Jim and I were driving to a place we weren’t familiar with. Since this was before smart phones and we didn’t know exactly where we were going, we of course had printed off directions from MapQuest ahead of time. On paper! We would reference the MapQuest directions occasionally, then place the sheet of paper on the dashboard until it was needed again.
At some point, we realized that the weather was warm enough that we should roll down the windows to get a nice breeze in the car. “Roll down the windows and turn up the tunes” as the kids say.
You can probably guess what happened next. Our printed directions were almost immediately sucked off the dashboard into the cabin of the car. Our only way of knowing where we were going and where we had been began swirling around in a tornado of chaos. We both grabbed furiously at the paper, trying to pin it to some solid surface, lest it blow out the window and leave us stranded out in god knows where.
After a few chaotic seconds, Jim was able to successfully secure the paper and I rolled our windows back up. The fact that the directions hadn’t flown out the window and that I hadn’t driven off the side of the road was a minor miracle. It was only in hindsight, after I played the scene back to myself in my mind that I realized the comedically genius thing that Jim had shouted in the middle of the chaos. It still makes me laugh to this day.
”GOD DAMN YOU Bernoulli!”
