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What I’ve Been Playing – 4 Months Edition

Sep 4th, 2023

Has it really been almost 4 months? Maybe it’s closer to three, but it’s been, way too long. I think there has actually been an entire Fortnite Season in there, because last post I was talking about Fortnite, Star Wars was still in there, and I want to say that was at the end of Ch4S2, and right now it’s the early days of Ch4S4. Whoops.

I did play Chapter 4 Season 3, though I didn’t get to level 200 in the Battle Pass. I actually was going to skip the pass but I kind of wanted Optimus Prime and I really wanted Tropical Meowscles. So they got me to buy in. Damn you FOMO. I have yet to bother with the Chapter 4 Season 4 pass though. Every skin in it is really uninteresting. I’m even kind of meh on Ahsoka. I’m going to play some, but without the pass, there is less pressure. If I manage to make it to level 100 I will probably buy in though, mostly because it’s worth it for the VBucks at that point, even if I archive most of the skins. But this way there is no real pressure.

I’m just, tired of passes and FOMO in general.

Except they got me in Sky as well. I had kind of dropped out of playing Sky, but the current season pass has some sweet glasses. I don’t care about unlocking much else, which sounds lame, I know, but they have revamped the cosmetic system a bit and now there are glasses, and shoes, which is cool. Plus the current pass is themed around photography in-game, and the new camera system. Sky is great for photography and the new system makes it easier to take pretty screenshots.

A simple one I played through was the Grimace’s Birthday Game Boy Color game. As part of this weird promotional push for Grimace, McDonald’s put out a short but real Game Boy Color game themed around the character. It’s only like 3 or 4 short levels. It’s surprisingly polished though for a free promotional piece.

Speaking of Game Boy Color games, I also played through Super Mario Brothers Deluxe on the Game Boy Color. It’s basically just a remake/rerelease of the original game. The colors are a bit nicer and there is a map in between worlds, though you can’t actually navigate around it like modern Super Mario Titles. It’s actually tricky in some points because the resolution on the Game Boy Color is smaller than the NES, so you are only seeing maybe, 66-75% of what you would normally see. Some of the jumps are literally blind jumps as a result. It’s easy to land right on a Koopa Troopa.

On the makes vein as well, and much more recently, I’ve been playing through the Quake II remaster. I have only played Quake I that I remember, and I have it on CD-ROM. I played a bit of Quake II went they released the RTX version but not a ton. I’ve been going at the remaster pretty hardcore. So far I’ve completed the main campaign, and the two mission packs, The Reckoning and Ground Zero. I’ve started on the N64 levels and will wrap up with the new levels, in Call of the Machine. I’ve been mixing true play with God Mode play a bit, depending on how much I want to care about playing. Sometimes I just want to chill and shoot Stroggs.

It’s been a few months, so there’s more. I’ve started replaying through the Phoenix Wright games again, on my 3DS. When the 3DS shop closed, I picked them all up for dirt cheap. I’m still in the first game, it’s been slow, but it’s enjoyable. Unfortunately Nintendo killed the ability to take screen shots of 3DS games ages ago.

I also replayed Actraiser. I have a very strong memory of this game from when I was younger. I had a friend stay over and we rented this game, and played it, all night, over and over. It’s a lot of fun and an interesting combination of city builder and side-scrolling action. Though the side-scrolling bits are kind of meh.

The Phoenix of Blogs

by Ramen Junkie.

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I had a differet, boring, snarky title for this post but then I decided to update my about page and it had the phrase “the Phoenix of Blogs” which fit way better.

I feel like I have written this post before. Maybe I have, but hey, whatever, it’s my post, my blog. Because Lameazoid seems to have used a cheat code for “Infinite Lives” at some point, I’m giving it yet another go. Blogging Intensifies was a fresh start on more personal projects blogging but I never really intended it to be a replacement for Lameazoid. It’s more a replacement for “everything else”. I also always intended to keep it super casual and basically, not sweat it if I don’t post anything for a while.

I really just need to apply that here.

Part of that initiative is just, pushing a much more casual style of posting. I’ve already been doing this a bit. Firstly for games. I’ve been posting those “What I’m Playing” posts. They are just that. here is what I’m doing, here is what I’m playing, it’s just long status update where I talk about games. For toys, I’m pulling back a bit from full on “reviews”. Reviews are a chore. They sort of demand a certain style and length and number of photographs etc etc. I sort of tried to replace doing full on reviews of toys for a while with the Wednesday Haul posts, about what I got new that week. But that was almost too much of a swing in the other direction.

One thing a few blogs I follow do that I like is just, cataloging their collection. Several do it daily. I don’t know that I’ll ever get that motivated, but that’s more the idea. Post about what I have. The thing is, not everything is really worthy of a full on review for whatever reason. Take this Mirrorverse Genie figure. I can’t really review that. It has almost no articulation so it’s only good for a handful of photos. It’s not a horrible figure if you want something kind of basic, it’s not amazing. I can’t really ramble on about it for a thousand words.

But with this new mindset, I can still, make a post about it. I can point out it’s flaws and things I like if I want, or not. I might even just post some that are just galleries of images sometimes. That doesn’t mean I won’t do more detailed reviews. But proper reviews are a complicated pain. I have to write a long posts that doesn’t feel rambling and repetitious. Including not repetitious to previous posts. I need to try to take like 10-12 photos, which often means 20+ photos, pick out the decent ones. Crop and edit those photos. Sometimes they use little props or other figures so I need to find those and set them up and put it all away. Then upload everything, format it all nicely.

I’m more just rolling back my personal expectations on myself. Because I don’t need to do that to myself. This isn’t my job, it’s my hobby. I don’t have any requirements, I don’t need to meet X posts per week. I need to just do it as I want.

This is also sort of where the gaming is as well with What I’m Playing. It’s a way to talk about some games I played, which I may not ultimately finish, but at least I can touch on if it is ok or sucks or whatever. I can always write more detailed posts as well.

But I feel less “obligated” to do so.

I’ve also been toying at the idea of bring back some of the old archived posts, though when I went poking around I didn’t find as much in there that is interesting that I had hoped to find.

Also, I post plenty on Blogging Intensifies as well. Programming Projects, Music, Technology commentary, etc.

Basically, [BI] = Nerd Stuff, Lameazoid = Geek Stuff.

20 Years of Blogging…

Oct 9th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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It seems like I should address this pretty big anniversary for this blog. Lameazoid.com, is twenty years old, more or less, today. I honestly don’t have the exact date for sure, but I do have an old copy of the original site that suggests it was created on 10/09/1998. More accurately, it’s predecessor, The Chaos Xone, was created on 10/09/1998. Back then it was just a random Geocities website. It didn’t really use a “Blog Engine” but it did use a “Blog format” of sorts, in the form of manually updated HTML webpages and a copy/paste archive of old posts.

Funny enough, it’s pretty much still the same thing… ish. I really haven’t cared about Anime in ages and the market for “Cool Waves” and “MIDI Files” hasn’t quite been the same in a long while. The Geocities Pokemon Center was a separate site I ran that was pretty successful at the time. This original website went through quite a few iterations, all sort of keeping the core idea of writing random “reviews” on “random crap”. It moved hosts a few times, from Geocities to Lameazoid the Livejournal, then ramenjunkie.wordpress.com, some stints on Blogger, self hosted at my house on a Linux box, to actually using real paid hosting. Somewhere around the time I left College and lost that free college hosting, and moving to WordPress I think is when I bought a domain and transformed The Chaos Xone, with it’s Edgy Cool 90s X (the X is for XTREEEEEEM), into Lameazoid.com.

Why Lameazoid?

I think at the time it was supposed to sort of be a sort of buzzword sounding name. Like Freakazoid, the show. Only Lame. I have to admit, back then I was way way more cynical about everything, so I sort of had the idea of focusing on Lame things. It also sounds kind of retro, which was also more of my shtick at the time. I do still like the name, it was a pretty good choice honestly.

Over the years though my overall ability and interest in actually writing has come and gone. If I’m being honest, lately it just feels like no one cares. And they really probably don’t. There was a time back in the mid 2000s when Blogging was huge and the site pulled in 1000 visits per day. That felt pretty awesome. These days, I’m lucky if I am getting 1000 visits a month, less so since I have not even been updating lately.

I’ve also purged things out completely a few times, for better or for worse. I have everything though, in an archive. I have a big ass local WordPress instance that has pretty much everything I’ve ever written in my life stuffed into it in one big ball of mind vomit. Good and bad. Not just Lameazoid and the Chaos Xone, I’ve scanned or transcribed old paper journals and writings into it. Digital space is cheap, it can be backed up safely and easily. Why ever delete anything?

I’ve also tried to actually reboot and spin off a few times. The most ambitious was Ready Set Geek, which essentially was a separation of Toys and Video Games. This leads to a bit of a conundrum on my part of where to stick the middle ground things like movies and comics. The most successful is probably BloggingIntensifies.com, though that’s more of a spin off of my “Personal Blogging”. I post there entirely because I want to, not to try to be some sort of New Games Journalism writer. I’ve tried pushing more into the “new hotness” that killed blogging, like Tumblr and Youtube, but I guess I’m just not into that sort of thing. I’ve considered trying to recruit people I know to also write here, there was a brief time (during that 1000 visits period) when I did have friends also writing reviews.

Running this site has been pretty great for a lot of indirect reasons though. I’ve gotten pretty good at working Linux, for example, through the need to run a web server. Its given me excuses to play with Photoshop and to take photos. I used to use it as an excuse to be an early adopter of a lot of social media sites. Knowing your way around the Social web is pretty useful.

Anyway, I mostly just wanted to acknowledge this little event. Here’s to 20 more years I guess.