Made of Ghosts

Saw it with the London cast and loved it, loved it again here. I really hated Aaron Burr’s singing voice though. I’d always heard he was great, was he ill on the night or something? King George was much better than his U.K. counterpart though. Angelica was fantastic as well.

Good, I went to great lengths to breed a purple windflower with zero success, then suddenly one sprang up in the wild and I’ve got no idea how. Still struggling with blue roses, purple hyacinths and purple tulips. Tulips seem to breed way slower than everything else. And every guide I’ve looked at seems incomplete.

Do all flowers clone themselves? Once you’ve bred a super-rare one you don’t have to keep doing it, you can just let it self-replicate, right?

You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you? [Bubblegum K.K. plays backwards]

I’ve only recently noticed this: when starting a new game i usually look it up on howlongtobeat.com first and check the average completion time. Especially if it’s an indie game, cos it’s hard to tell if something like that will last two hours or twenty hours. You can kinda tell from the price sometimes but not always. This is partly to decide whether or not I’m gonna try and complete it in one sitting - I don’t want that annoying situation of coming back for a second sesh only to discover I was five minutes away from the finish line (as recently happened with Gorogoa). But aside from that, I just like to have a rough idea of how long it’s going to take. Some games give you this information in an indirect way by having a list of levels or whatever, but a lot of games just carry on until they end and that’s that. Sometimes you’re able to infer from the story and/or pacing, but that’s a tricky situation too - something like Half-Life 2 will provide you with an ultimate goal, but then throw constant obstacles and detours in your path, so it’s never really clear how far away you are from the end. Or with Zelda you’ll know how many Special Things you have to collect - but there’s probably another set after that. (I guess a newcomer might plausibly expect OoT to end after the third spiritual stone?) Is it an important element of game design to give the player a rough sense of how far through they are? Or do you not really care?

It hasn’t come back since Mario Kart 7 though right? We need GTA Wuhu Island.

Relentlessly blasting you with soulful violin music in an attempt to be artsy and emotional, without actually doing anything to earn the emotional response.

I really get a kick out of the whole “big scary underwater objects” thing. (Submechanophobia? Except that refers to manmade objects and I find whales and stuff just as scary.) Can’t really think of a game that does this.

Maybe an artefact of the exaggerated curvature of the Earth?

I remember LOVING Underworld despite high levels of jank. It felt like a real return to the "voyage into the unknown" ethos of the original series. Legend was fun enough in a "safe" kind of way, and Anniversary was enjoyable up until a very weak final act.

OK, dawn in this game is beautiful.

Yep I just hopped on for a quick late night sesh and caught like seven new fish!

Toddled over to Resident Services to build my ninth incline only to discover you can only have eight at a time! FUMING.

How have you made those big custom signs in the back??

Daddy's home.