My posting rate has fallen off a cliff in recent months so I thought I'd put some general effort into it today....nothing big, just a "What have I been up to?" post. So, here it goes, one paragraph on each thing!
Resident Evil
This is a great Zach Cregger movie, but maybe (imo) not a great Resident Evil movie. It is a good Survival Horror movie, though, and if they had called it Survival Horror The Movie I would have been 100% on board with it. Whether the film captures Resident Evil depends heavily on whether you consider the RE universe of the games to be relevant to the RE formula, and as it happens I think that by scrubbing the film of virtually any connective tissue to the games other than the feel and pacing of a survival horror experience, you are instead left with a perfectly okay horror film that does nothing for the RE franchise. As a campy, humorous Zach Cregger movie though its pretty fun. I would have preferred a cameo from Auntie from Weapons in this over a tepid and vague tie-in to a version of Umbrella Corp run by Gen Z scientists and ineffective middle managers.
Shadowdark
Although I had lamented the brevity of writing in Shadowdark, I have nonetheless been thinking a lot about how Shadowdark's inherent play style design meshes so much better with what I want out of an RPG these days. Pathfinder 2E, which I run weekly, is fun but I constantly feel like the laboriously rules-laden mechanical elements are always getting in the way. My players might disagree though, so I am now considering a return to Shadowdark maybe on a new weekend game. Note that I have not abandoned OSE by any stretch....I feel like OSE and Shadowdark are complimentary but different takes on the same essential experience, and I see intrinsic value in both systems' approaches.
OneXPlayer 2 Air
This lovely device arrived a few weeks ago, and it is a weird hybrid laptop/tablet/gaming handheld concept that OneXPlayer likes to push out a lot, along with their other more conventional handheld devices. I have never gotten a OneXPlayer device before so was keen to get this, and the price was tolerable. It's core is essentially identical to the MSI Claw 8 AI+ which is currently residing in my #1 preferred spot as my best handheld purchase from last year, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. So far though I've found its compact portability is absolutely best for treating it like a mini laptop, and its utility as a handheld gaming device is proportionate to my desire to hold the thing for longer bouts of gaming, which is honestly less fun than holding a smaller and more conventional handheld design. But its compact design has made it my preferred device for managing character sheets (e.g. Pathbuilder) and PDFs at the gaming table, and its performance with games is excellent, I just find pairing the controllers with a grip connector and playing on it like a gaming laptop is the preferred experience for me.
PSP
Yeah the PSP from like20+ years ago! I found one for cheap the other day (my original died and then exploded a long time ago due to battery issues I didn't realize would happen), and I am rekindling my collection of UMDs. It's a fun device! It is my new retro gaming vector for collecting, and I am having a lot of fun finding old favorites from two decades ago.
Okay, that's it! That's what I've been up to, aside from running Pathfinder on Wednesdays and OSE on Fridays. More to come, I'll try to get back into the writing groove here...
