It's spooky season! Wait, no, again. Spooky season is over! Or are we still in it? For just this week you say? I never really understood the Halloween craze and dismissed it as yet another Americanized craze that made its way to Europe, but after participating in a ghost hunt for children, I revised my opinion: it can be a lot of fun, both for the children and their parents. Luckily, our daughter is still too young to get frightened by the man with the creepy mask and hopefully dull axe. She looked at everything with great interest, including the gory props. Don't worry, there was still plenty of daylight left, keeping the truly horrifying jump-scares at bay.

Somehow, last month's Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media post recently blew up in popularity and made it to Hacker News. I'm glad to see others still fighting the fight as well. The comments on that site are... interesting.

Previous month: September 2023.

Books I've read

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Brieven uit Genua (Letters from Genoa) is finished at last. Although the writing in Genoa is as excellent and erudite as can be expected of a Pfeijffer work, I still prefer Grand Hotel Europa.

I tried getting into several books, such as John Cleese's On Life And How To Survive It, but the writing was surprisingly small (and unstructured). On top of that, the material isn't easy to digest just before bedtime, and as I realized I was in need of a good fiction work instead, so I switched to my twenty year old Mallorea series by David Eddings. Judging by the yellowed pages and musty smell, it's been a long time since I've picked these up. I guess it's a good thing I can't remember the details.

Games I've played

Speaking of spooky season, I picked DUSK as the matching game to play during Halloween after finishing the perhaps even more bloody Nightmare Reaper. The latter employs procedural generation for its levels while the former boasts truly excellent hand-crafted level design. DUSK might be my new favorite retro-inspired shooter, it's amazing, as is the flawless 60 FPS Nintendo Switch port.

For those of you living under a rock, Nintendo surprised us with a new 2D Mario game called Super Mario Wonder. In anticipation of its release, I (re)played New Super Mario Bros. 2 and its 2006 predecessor on the original Nintendo DS. They're fun, but the formula has been recycled to death, and the cheerful theme song the Koopas and Goombas dance to quickly gets on my nerves. It's wonderful (ha!) that Wonder finally moves on from this formula.

In-between the horror shooters and Mario plumbing, my wife discovered a few small indie games on sale: Freaky Trip---a disappointingly buggy single-screen point & click game---and A Tiny Sticker Tale---a wholesome but too short scrapbook adventure.

Selected (blog) posts

Not much this month. I haven't kept up with things on the internet, and it feels great.

• To keep up with the theme of this month, Wired put up a scary article: How Google Alters Search Queries To Get At Your Wallet. Strangely enough, it has been removed because "it did not meed the editorial standards". I wonder what's behind that...
• Niki summarized the absolute minimum you should know about Unicode in 2023.
• If you want to have a laugh, try scrolling through Rock Paper Shotgun's Very Important List of PC Games.
• Florian Sauer over at Game Developer wrote a great piece on how to deal with memory constraints using the Indiana Jones port adventure to the N64 as an example. It's very old---both the game and the article---but still.
• I loved Joel Chrono's What's on my PSP?. Reminds me to write a What's on my 3DS? one as a response.
• André Garzia shared how he hacked together a way to share contacts using QR codes without requiring a network connection.
• Kev Quirk wrote about his iPhone addiction, and the general smartphone usage a day numbers are staggering: "In 2022, users in the United Kingdom spent an average of four hours and 14 minutes per day using their mobile devices". Holy crap, we need help.
• Rach Smith's children asked her if you could be anything, what would you be?, and she answered: "I would be exactly what I am, doing the job I do now, and being your mum, of course!" and asks herself whether or not that's due to a lack of imagination as an adult? I wouldn't know how to answer this either...
• Bix Frankonis emailed me a link to his The Identity Of Blogging And The Blogging Of Identity post as a follow-up to my Blogging Nets More Than Just Text---thanks!

Other random links

• Ion Fury, the 2018 game running on Duke Nukem 3D's Build Engine I really liked, has got an expansion called Aftershock! I hope it makes its way to the Switch.
• Did you know they're still building expansions for Age of Empires II (Definitive Edition), in essence a 24 year old game? Woah!
• Invidious seems to be a good alternative for watching YouTube videos.
• Joel pointed me towards a few game-related podcasts I didn't know: Into the Aether and Retro Game Time Machine.