Weekly Update 2025-06-22
Caffeine Blues
What with all the hassle of Next Fest last week, I wound up not doing my normal summary of updates and such, so for this week, I decided to check thoroughly and mention everything from the past two weeks. That means this should be a double-sized post, right? Wrong! Turns out not much has happened in the past two weeks! At least, not anything I deign to talk about. Stuff happened, you know. But I don't care about that crap.
Game Releases and Updates
Approaching Infinity updates - my favorite roguelike has had two major updates in as many weeks, which added two things I noted as features I badly wanted last year. The first is alien officers, given to the four major races that don't have victory questlines, and each one is a unique class from all of the normal human officer types. The other is the ability to stuff current officers into cryo-pods, setting them aside to free up a spot on your crew so you can swap in a different class without having to totally delete a character you've spent multiple hours promoting.
I'm really excited to unlock my first alien crew, probably starting with the pirate Buccaneer. Unfortunately I went a bit too far in my current save file on Insane difficulty and got one-shot by a rogue Narcratu ship, so I'm starting a new file specifically to unlock the pirate officer and go raiding.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades - new toys abound since the last time I played this VR shooting range, including a host of new optics and nightvision gear. I booted up intending to test all that stuff out but instead I wound up playing the Take and Hold a few times with random gear, including a bolt action rifle that was cut down to a hilariously bad pistol. I’ll try out the NV stuff next time, I promise. *actually just plays with stupid gimmick guns again*
The State of Games Played
I spent most of my small amount of free time this week playing through Project Warlock 2. I beat all three episodes in story mode so I could unlock the Realmshift free-play mode, and did a little bit of that. It was pretty enjoyable but very uneven, both in difficulty and general quality.
I also chipped away a bit more at Can of Wormholes - a few of the puzzle gimmicks I've encountered have been really cool, but I sense I'm near the end of straightforward puzzles you walk up and do, and am about to be forced to use screenshots and environmental clues to figure out how to unlock the rest.
With most of my big obligations over I returned to The Siege and the Sandfox, and have explored maybe half the map. This is a pretty fantastic Steam Deck game, though, and I might hang on to it to play when I travel next month.
I've secured a couple victories in Void War, unlocking an already solid variety of ships and commander types, and yet I've still only scratched the surface. There's apparently around a dozen difficulty tiers to work through, I've still got whole ship subsystems I haven't really played with, and about half the ships can be unlocked for free by winning victories with particular ships. So far my favorite runs have been heavily focused on boarding parties, supported by lances to cause initial damage and draw the enemy crew into an ambush, and missile types to keep their weapons offline while my goons clean up.
Writing
The End of Dyeus's writeup didn't take long, and I doubt my post on Project Warlock 2 will either. Both games are interesting, pretty fun, and a bit disappointing, but in ways that are easily expressed. I may have complicated feelings about them, but that doesn't mean the posts have to be complicated.
After PW2's writeup, I'll probably spend the rest of my week finishing up my next essay so I can post it before going on vacation. What if I don’t make it? Then I don’t make it. In the meantime I un-paywalled my first two essays, as if anyone cared.
Other
I'm heading home to visit the folks in a little over a week - I'd intended to go on a caffeine reset beforehand, but circumstances pushed that back and now I don't know if I really have enough time to not be ass-dragging on a flight. I'm torn between just waiting until I get back or trying to do a half-assed weaning for a week when I want to get some work done. I should just be honest with myself and get another cup of coffee right now.