Tag: gaming

Gratitude 2025

The stunning view from Amtrak’s Empire Builder line.

It’s been a long time since I’ve made a simple post about things going on in my life, and there’s no better way to frame it around the recent passing of Thanksgiving. Here’s a handful of things I’m grateful for, beyond the typical family, friends and health, all if which I am of course extremely thankful.

Archipelago and Fan Mods

I recently wrote on the amazing things fan communities have brought to a variety of games. Not just in challenge runs with an existing game, but overhauling it through mods.

Randomizers have been fun to run on my own, but adding in a multiplayer element with the archipelago system is a whole new level of enjoyment. Being able to play a wide range of games with my friends, all the while unlocking items and progress for each other is a blast. Hundreds of games are available in this system, and the list is ever growing as more and more modders are able to shake things up.

Randomizers are just one of hundreds if not thousands of ways mods have changed gaming. Adding new content, adjusting difficulty or outright changes to a games fundamental gameplay systems are all possible when modders have the tools and the willpower to put something together.

I was talking with my brother just the other day on how unique of a playthrough Skyrim, what is probably one of the most modded games of all time, can be with just a few mods to change things up.

A majority of Old School RuneScape (OSRS) players rely on the free tools in Runelite and the OSRS Wiki. Both of these are tools maintained by the community. The wiki, much like Wikipedia, is a crowd sourced encyclopedia and knowledge base of all things OSRS. Runelite is an alternative client to the main OSRS game. It allows a variety of plugins that lightly interact with or even expand the game, e.g. highlighting certain gameplay elements, playing different sound effects than normal or even enhance the multiplayer experience.

One of the most incredible things about many mods is that they are for the most part free. I do think modders are well within their right to ask for or expect some kind of compensation. What is nice as a consumer is that for the most part, so many of these creators are willing to do the work they do without expectation of financial gain.

The Windy City Rollers and the Derby Community

On the subject of putting in time for no expectation of getting paid, over the last few years I’ve been lucky to be able to volunteer to help The Windy City Rollers (WCR), Chicago’s flat track derby team. My friend brought me to a bout WCR had with New York’s Gotham Roller Derby a few years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. The movement and explosiveness of derby is a blast to watch.

As I attended more and more games, I began volunteering at first for simple roles like helping with the merch stand, but with time I’ve even gotten to assist more behind the scenes as a Non-Skating Official (NSO).

Helping primarily at scrimmages, I’ve been cutting my teeth on the tasks and duties and should soon be helping at my first actual game. I’m excited to be involved in the derby community and learn more about the sport, all the while meeting new people along the way.

Amtrak

Just before the first roller derby bout of this season, I had the pleasure of going on my first long train trip across the country. In order to visit some friends in Seattle, I took the Empire Builder line from Chicago to Seattle, and it was an absolute blast.

My departure trip was in coach, and while a little rough, there was a grittiness to the journey that I enjoyed. There wasn’t much to do, so I was able to get a ton of reading done which was really nice. I was able to catch up on a few books I’d been meaning to get around to but never made the time while at home.

While trains are quite a bit slower than something like a plane, there’s a freedom and flexibility you totally miss out on. Being able to walk to a different part of the train gives the feeling that you aren’t trapped in place until the trip is done. Being able to enter the observation car when I was tired of my seat was a relief. The cafe car below offered a decent range of food to stay satiated throughout the whole trip.

The downside of coach was difficulty in sleeping. I had an expectation of some kind of bedding for the night, but was quite surprised when there was nothing at all. This was definitely a layer of that grit. I figured there was nothing to do but get through everything. Otherwise, the other rough part was how long I was wearing the same clothes. Finally arriving in Seattle, I took a shower and realized I’d worn the same socks for three days. I did find there is a dressing room that I will certainly take advantage of should I take coach again in the future.

The return trip was a very different story, as I took a private sleeping car, the first class of trains. This experience was a luxury. Meals in the dining car were included, I had a full bed made for me by a member of the train staff and of course a fully private space for the 46 hour journey.

To start with the meals, I was surprised how good they were. Coach passengers can attend meals in the dining car, but they are $20, $25 and $45 for breakfast, lunch and dinner respectively. I had planned to try out the food, and decided to wait until my meals were covered before doing so. I’ve got to say they are really good. The food is all chef prepared meals, with the dinner being a full 3 course starter, main and dessert all of which were fantastic.

The private space was of course a luxury in of itself. After three days in coach and then three more days at my friends’ apartment, it was definitely nice to have even just a few cubic meters completely to myself. I did not get much reading done on the return trip, but I did play some games, watch some videos and even get some writing done.

Finally, both trips had some amazing views. While about half of the trip pulls through the western Midwest, from Illinois to North Dakota, partway into Montana the mountains emerge and the remote feeling of where the tracks lie provide incredible views.

Roguelikes and Randomizers

Finding myself with less time to play games these days, I tend to hop into ones I can pick up and put down relatively easy. Roguelikes are a genre that scratch this quick itch. Although lately, I’ve been hooked on the randomizer mod for Kingdom Hearts 2 and noticed is that randomizer runs can work on this same design. Both roguelikes and randomizers involve playing through familiar areas with different builds and tools for a given challenge

Roguelikes

The roguelikes genre has seen a boom over the last few years, driven by Indies like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac in the early twenty-teens. Their origin goes back to the namesake, Rogue. A procedurally generated adventure game created in 1980, its core gameplay elements still used in the genre today.

The gameplay loop of a roguelike involves a single life or session in which failure results in a permanent loss of any progression made. Though some ‘roguelites” include an overall progression on top of the single run gameplay. Throughout this single life, players gain loot, levels or other power ups to take on harder challenges

Ravenswatch is a fairy tale inspired roguelike that can be played with up to a group of four. The game was a big hit with my group of friends, many of which are also fans of the Supergiant’s latest release Hades II and the poker roguelike Balatro. The on-the-fly nature of build crafting paired with solid moment to moment gameplay offers an excellent experience, and it’s even better with friends.

Handling Hardcore

What about games in which perma-death or a single run isn’t part of the core design? Could introducing the thrill of risk offer a new experience for longtime players.

MMOs typically rely on a general build up of levels and gear so that more challenging content can be explored. To lose progress is almost antithetical to the progression driven gameplay that a MMO thrives on.

Before the OSRS bug bit me, I was a long time on and off World of Warcraft player. I first started playing in middle school and it was my first real MMO experience. With years of playing on and off, it was with the release of the Hardcore game mode that from a few years ago that brought me back for what is now the last time.

Hardcore mode was the kind of shake up that WoW’s Classic player base needed to breath some like into the now more-or-less mastered game. Dying and losing it all after months of playing with hundreds of hours on the line gave each encounter real stakes. It could be an epic battle during a raid or as simple as not respecting fall damage. Death was always around the corner.

Hardcore modes are nothing new. Blizzard Entertainment’s own Diablo series had a hardcore mode as far back as the second entry. Permadeath was the fundamental way of playing early videogames both in the arcade and at home. More recently, Hollow Knight offered Steel Soul mode and Baldur’s Gate 3 included Honor Mode.

Even in MMOs, Old School Runescape introduced it’s hardcore Ironman mode back in 2016 as an addition to it’s other Ironman challenge modes. I think OSRS’s handling of perma-death modes is one I prefer. Once a hardcore Ironman dies, their current level, boss kills and other stats are locked into the high scores, but the character is still playable with all gear, levels, etc. but simply as a normal Ironman.

Mods and Self Made Challenges

Sometimes games don’t offer built in challenges like perma-death modes, but this hasn’t stopped gamers from making their own fun in unofficial ways.

Speed running has existed since as long as games have. Records and high scores are all targets for any kind of game. This approach to a game is almost like a roguelike or hardcore experience. Countless runs are cut short after a mistake cost too much time, and ending the run is the best course of action. Even in success, that progress is reset the next time the timer starts.

Beyond speed running, fans and players of a wide range of game have experimented with both challenge runs within games’ exiting rules and beyond them. The explosion of randomizer mods in the last decade is a subject I can possibly do a thorough deep dive on. I’ve recently had the joy of setting up the Kingdom Hearts 2 randomizer, and it is an absolute blast.

Randomizers are modifications to the game that take a game’s typical rewards and shuffles them throughout the entirety of the experience. For example, in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, the Fairy Bow is found in a specific chest in the Forest Temple, typically the fourth dungeon a player would enter on a normal playthrough. A randomizer might place the bow in a chest in the starting area of the game. Different games have a different range of settings and options, all of which take the original gameplay experience and shake it up enough that even veteran players may have a difficult time.

The Kingdom Hearts 2 randomizer has been a fun way to change up a play through from the typical start to finish. Having different abilities, items and options for taking on a given boss forces me to get better at understanding how all the elements of the game come together. This with only a few runs of randomizing the bosses themselves, which has it’s own challenges and comedy to the mix – who would have thought Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean could become the leader of the Organization!

Returning to the hardcore concept and the Zelda series, recent game mode added to The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time randomizers brings the permadeath risk to the games. A new “gloom mode” which permanently removes Link’s hearts after every hit. This combines another set of community challenge runs of “no hit” or one-hit KO runs into the randomizer directly.

Any game offers permadeath by simply quitting a file or playthrough. For the brief period I streamed on Twitch, a number of my nights were spent playing Skyrim with permadeath for each character. The creator Joov has made a number of videos exploring different games with permadeath in mind.

Just as I finished my final draft on this post, I stumbled on this video by 360chrism in which over 500 players randomized 500 games’ items into one giant cooperative playthrough. Across these games, over 140 unique games were included. From Super Mario 64 to MS Paint. This is a simple showcase of how customizable randomizers have become.

I could continue on and on with different games and how permadeath adds to the experience, but my recent affixation on randomizers and roguelikes was a particular topic I wanted to reflect on.