Melkur’s Blog.

 As a change from all the gaming posts, I’d like to return to music.  Depeche Mode are one of my favourite bands, I really liked their early stuff (and still do) but when I bought a couple of compilations years ago I discovered the brilliance of tracks like ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Personal Jesus’ (which somehow passed me by when they actually came out, not sure how that happened.)  The evolution of their sound over the years is pretty amazing, they definitely took a turn into darker, moody territory that you might not have expected. I should also mention the ‘Remixes 81-04’ album, that too is fantastic (my personal favourite being Mike Shinoda’s ‘Enjoy the Silence [Reinterpreted]’.

 Guess what, I’m talking about gaming!  Anyway, this is a quick one, a somewhat embarrassing (but fairly amusing) experience I had a couple of years ago with a platform/adventure type game.  What happened was that I thought I was doing really well, I was maybe up to level 120-odd or something and thought I must be progressing well.  Then I suddenly had a thought that since the levels were all different (obviously) but seemed oddly similar that I’d better just check it wasn’t random (and therefore probably infinite.)  I think you can guess the rest, I could still be playing it now (and for rather a long time in the future.)  It’s a bit like the feeling of downloading a large file in the early days of dial-up. 😁

 I’ve just bought a new platform game and it’s a pretty decent one, thus partially bringing to an end my feeling of being in a ‘dry spell’ and not finding too many decent games.  The last other recent better game I bought was two days ago but I’ve already finished that one!  😝 There’s one thing for sure, I’m not in a dry spell in terms of my blogging - don’t worry, it won’t last!  I can’t really pretend there’s any plan behind all this, if you’d told me when I started that gaming would semi-dominate things on here, I’d probably have been quite surprised.  But I suppose that’s part of the attraction, you can just go in whatever direction you fancy… [Note to self, go in a slightly different direction for the next entry at least. 😁]

 I could have added this onto yesterday’s entry but figured the clash of subjects might not sound too good with the tone of that entry.  So here goes (maybe not what you’d call a ‘meaty’ entry coming up here, definitely a more lightweight one!)  What’s tempting here is the combination last night of lemon cheesecake and chocolate milk, mmmm.  In case I’m making myself sound ridiculously unhealthy on here, I’m not, I’m only mentioning some of the highlights of (normally balanced) diet. 😀

 Another entry…it’s not that long ago that I was thinking I wasn’t writing much at all on here!  Anyway, I’m returning to television, this time I’m waffling about one of the types of programme I’ve been watching a fair amount lately - true crime.  It’s amazing just how many of these types of programmes are on nowadays, I don’t know if this is exclusively a recent thing in the UK as I haven’t really watched TV all that much in recent years.  But I can say, it’s probably lucky I like some of these shows as there are a lot , although that’s a bit of a ‘chicken-and-egg’ sort of situation as I wouldn’t have seen them so much if there weren’t!

 No, it’s not another food entry, but (yet) another gaming entry!  The title refers to the fact that in recent years, I’ve got into puzzle type games, a type I never really used to touch because I generally found them too frustrating.  A good example is Sokoban-style ‘push the box’ games, where honestly I can sometimes breeze through several levels only to spend half an hour on one level continually pushing boxes back and forth, alternating between thinking ‘What am I missing?’ and ‘Have they made a mistake with this level?’ 😁 But then suddenly you do that one thing you just couldn’t seem to see… For me, the ultimate puzzle game in recent times must be ‘Baba Is You’.  Extremely clever and equally difficult, an amazing experience.  As an example of what I mean, I can remember hesitating before I bought it, wondering if it really was possible that you felt as if you were changing the game rules as you played as it implied.  The answer is yes, and it can actually feel quite odd but defin