Since Tempus Gameit entered the chat folks in my timeline have been using it to talk about insights into their gaming habits. While personal edification is great, being able to use it as a source for a blog post seems to be where it’s at.

My August was filled with four games — technically, five — one of which should be of no surprise, but time spent with the other three — technically, four — were like raindrops on a sunny day: tiny and infrequent.

Star Citizen of Course

Of course Star Citizen dominated my play time. Early in the month saw me wrestling with 4.9 for a while, but after about a week I went pretty radio-silent not just with Star Citizen, but overall.

There comes a time in every Star Citizen patch where what’s there is no longer new and exciting, and the bugs start to become the feature focus. A lot of the perpetually playing community members take a sabbatical during this time, usually until the next patch. In this case, though, I believe my later spikes starting on the 19th were when I was admitted to the public test universe queue, where I jumped into test out the Battaglia missions. At least one of those taller pillars in the third quarter was when @CakedCrusader and I tried the Siege of Orison on the PTU for the first time.

Star’s Reach Early Access

Well, that’s kind of sad. I have one peak for Star’s Reach, on the 5th, when it launched in early access. I swear I actually tried it a few times, but never for very long which might be why it only shows up once — although I’d have had to have only played for mere minutes for TG to not register it.

I’m sad for my opinion on Star’s Reach because I feel it’s a bit too…I don’t know a better word for it…silly. I can deal with bugs and issues obviously, but the overall tone of the game doesn’t do it for me. That might sound like a dumb reason to walk away from a game that for all intents and purposes should be a slam dunk for me, but appearances matter and I can’t get past Star’s Reach’s drip right now. Is that still a thing? Drip?

MS Flight Simulator

I’ve had MSFS 2020 on my wish list for a while because in for a flight sim penny, in for a flight sim setup pound. It feels like a waste of space to have a dedicated flight sim setup at my desk just for Star Citizen, so when MSFS went on sale for $20 I picked it up.

TG’s registration was me looking through the menus and starting the first tutorial flight. Sadly, I didn’t have my HOSAS set up for this game and didn’t know enough about the game and what it would ask of me to be able to do that, so I tried with just the K&M. Since I was on the tenkeyless keyboard at the time, when the tutorial asked me to use the numpad to activate flaps or something, I couldn’t do it.

I haven’t been back since.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

I had been looking for a first-person dungeon crawler for a while, and have several winners on the wish list which have yet to be released (I tried and loved their demos), but I wanted something now, dammit! so again, another sale brought this re-do of the OG Wizardry game. I had never played this when it first-first launched which seems weird in retrospect, though Ye Olde Wikipaedia says it launched in 1981 — when I was 7 — and by the time we acquired a C64 I was probably looking at newer, more flashier games than the original black & white line-drawings of Wizardry.

This is a case of my suspected ADHD getting the better of me because while I still have the game installed, I have played it again only once and only for a few, non-recorded minutes. I feel bad, but also not, which is the conundrum I and gamers like me live with every day.

Honorable Mention: Star Wars: Zero Company

This game dropped at the end of August, but I don’t check TG’s UI every day so while it did identify the presence of the game, it was waiting for me to acknowledge that it was seen before it started tracking the time played. As such, I’m not sure how long I’ve played, but I have been thinking about it lately, so the answer is “not enough”.

Summary

17 and a half hours of gaming time in August. That seems low for me (compared to July which was 1 day, 8 hours). Since the lion’s share was Star Citizen, and because of the end-of-patch lull, I guess it makes sense. It would be a lot less if I hadn’t been excited enough about 4.10 to jump into the test server, but not even four other games could add significant time to the tally.

A lot of time in this month was dedicated to finally getting around to learning CSS. But wait, Scopique! You’ve been a web/app developer for over 30 years! Don’t you know CSS? As with a lot of things, I know enough to get by, but not enough to be as effective as I should be at this point in my life. Design has always been my weakest subject and while knowing the rules of CSS won’t help that, I might be able to fake it better.

I also spent a lot of my weekend time working on refacing our deck. We hired some handymen to rip up the old, worn planks but my wife and I have been laying down the composite replacement boards ourselves. This was the first large scale home improvement task I have ever undertaken, so there was an extreme learning curve. Plus, at 52 with a desk job, I’m surprised I still have mobility. While the work is almost done — we could only ever work on it on the weekends, weather permitting — we’re coming to terms with some pretty obvious fuck-ups on our part. My wife wants to patch it and move on and my usual lazy self is inclined to agree, but after having spent the better part of the month working on this, and knowing what work we’d need to do in order to fix it right, I’m inclined to give in to my newfound sense of whole-assery instead of my usual half-assery in this case.