Hollow Knight and Undertale homemade Plushies!

What with Christmas and Covid things seem to have gone a bit crazy round here.  But now Christmas Day is over, I can finally post some of the plushies I made on here!  Seb wanted a lot of weird plushies that you can't really buy, so I started making them for him, and in the end I made a LOT of plushies.  He had a bin bag full of plushies (though a few were lovely official ones).  I ended up making plushies for friends too, so it certainly kept me busy.  

These are four of the plushies I made for Seb, all of which I had to make up since I didn't have patterns for them...

Gruz Mother

I do like this one, which was one of the first I made - she's just so big and squishy!  It has been suggested that I ought to make a Mark 2 with a zip so you can let all the baby gruzzers in her out... 

Nailmaster Sly

The other Hollow Knight plushie I made was Sly.  He turned out pretty well - it was hard to make his massive nail, but I made it as big as I could.  I expect I could have put something inside it to make it stronger.  Perhaps I will learn more about all this if I keep making plushies.

Annoying Dog

It's weirdly difficult to do square pixelly things in fleece plushie form, but this Undertale cutie turned out pretty well!  I printed him out to make the pattern, and also to use as a guide for cutting out the felt face details.

Gaster

This last one was weird.  I was instructed you had to be able to turn him upside down so his hands/shirt make another strange face.  So I copied him as best I could.  Not the best but Seb was happy with him!

I made a bunch of other things for people, Pokemon and Ghibli related, some of which I used patterns for (there are lots of great Pokemon patterns, many of which are free).  I think Seb has given me a new obsession!  

Also, I really hope I'm getting some serious mum points for all this.  ;-)

I have played Pocket Camp too much...

It finally happened, Level 200.  Not a day goes by without me logging in and performing pointless tasks for these animals...

Level 200, woo

I don't think I am the sort of person they want playing their game, mind you - I refuse to spend actual cash!  I will grind for my leaf tickets!

;-)

Ramble: Indie games are GREAT VALUE!

I had a few things bubbling around in my head that haven't come to anything, but this morning Seb and I were discussing something that's a relatively new phenomenon - the continual updating of games.  We were particularly thinking of Hollow Knight when we started talking, but it got me thinking.  

Remember the old days, when games were released on floppy disks and if they were full of bugs that was it?  No 'day of release' bug fixes.  No DLCs.  The game you paid for was the game you got.  And sometimes that was not a good game.  I particularly remember playing the much hyped Rise of the Robots on the CD32.  That was awful in so many ways...

But apart from the bug fix updates, and the paid for DLCs, these days so many indie developers keep releasing content for years after the game's official release.  I don't know how they can afford to keep doing this - are they attracting new players with the new updates?  Or are they just doing it because they love the game?  Whatever the reason, I've thought of a few games we play that have had significant updates in their lifetime.  Pay once for these and get so much more than you paid for.  In the case of Terraria we've had nine years of significant updates and additions!  What could be better value than that?

First game is the aforementioned Hollow Knight (PEGI-7), a metroidvania game where you have to save a beautiful bug kingdom from a mysterious infection.  This was released in 2017 and has had four major updates, as well as various bug fixes etc.: "Hidden Dreams", "Grimm Troupe", "Lifeblood" and "Godmaster" (released August 2018).  These DLCs go way beyond the initial Kickstarter goals and they were all FREE.  They introduced new areas such as The Hive, and new bosses like Grimm, and new challenge modes like the Pantheons, with the Absolute Radiance (new final boss).

Hollow Knight's last DLC, Godmaster

Second game is another one Seb has played A LOT - Terraria (PEGI-12), a game where you build, mine and defeat some awesome bosses.  This came out in 2011 and has just had its final update - "Rounding Out The Journey".   This has had lots of updates adding new enemies, bosses, biomes and items, and also seasonal events like the Frost Legion Christmas event and Pumpkin Moon Halloween event.  Terraria 1.2 added some major new features including The Crimson (an alternative to The Corruption, a sort of evil biome that spreads across your world in the late game).  1.4 added "Journey Mode", which is sort of a creative mode for the game, and as such a completely new way to play it.  It also added the Empress of Light, Seb's favourite boss.

Terraria's last update - Journey's End

Third game is Stardew Valley (PEGI-12), where you have to become an expert farmer while helping out townsfolk and finding someone to marry.  This was released in 2016 and I believe it's still being updated.  Most updates added things like items, buildings and character interactions, but 1.3.27 added multiplayer, letting you farm with a friend.  This was further enhanced in later updates, with 1.4.0 adding lots of things to the multiplayer experience, including a Four Corners farm map, meant for co-op play.  (This update was huge, with all sorts of crazy things - 181 shirts, 35 hats, even Dinosaur Mayonnaise!)

Stardew Valley's multiplayer update

Fourth game is Slime Rancher (PEGI-3), a game where you, erm, ranch slimes.  This came out in 2017 and again I believe it's still being updated.  Plenty of new content has appeared over the years, with "Ogden's Wild Update", "Mochi's Megabucks Update", "Viktor's Experimental Update", and "Wiggly Wonderland" Christmas events.  The updates have added all sorts of things - new areas, slimes, gadgets, quests...  If you've ever wanted to farm cute slimes and dress them in scuba gear, now you can.

Slime Rancher Pool Party update

Fifth game I'm going to mention is The Long Dark (PEGI-16), where you have to survive in the Canadian Great White North after a strange geomagnetic disaster  - I am on tenterhooks with this one!  The game was first released in 2017 though it has changed significantly since initial release.  (It began as a sandbox survival game in 2014.)  There are two aspects to this game - the survival mode, and the story mode.  They reworked the first two episodes and released a "Redux" update in December 2018, with dialogue re-recorded, missions changed, gameplay improvements - it made the story mode much better.

The Long Dark episode 3 - Crossroads Elegy

Episode 3 (Crossroads Elegy) arrived in October 2019.  We are still waiting for episode 4!  The survival mode updates include new maps, new items, events (such as one where you had to, erm, eat Canadian food).  This is a weird one, updates wise, since you pay for the game and then have to wait for them to finish it - there are supposed to be five episodes altogether.  I sincerely hope they make it to the fifth one, since the fourth has been delayed until next year (boo Covid).

Canadian delicacy, ketchup crisps

With some games, then, you have updates you never expected to happen, adding all sort of cool stuff to a game you were perfectly happy with in the first place.  For completionists this can be a bit of a nightmare, since the goalposts are constantly moving - Hollow Knight is now up to 112% completion if you're speedrunning it.  On the other hand, sometimes you can pay for a game and then wait years for the whole story to be released.  And there's always the worry something will happen and you'll never get to send how it all ended...

However you look at it, games like these are a wonderful thing.  It's fantastic to have dedicated teams of people who love their games and want to keep improving them.  It's definitely not something you get with big titles.  You might get some paid for DLCs.  Or in-game purchases to add stuff.  But you don't get the sheer quantity of free additional things that you do with these small 'indie' games.  

Support these guys, show them some love, they deserve it!

Ramble: Over analysing iconic video game characters!

And so, having looked at various things online, I have compiled a list of 25 iconic video game characters.  (But that is not the point of this, oh no, please read on!)  These are characters who have spawned franchises, numerous sequels, or films.  These are the characters that people think of when you tell them to name a video game character.  But if we look at these characters, what can we learn?  You probably never thought about it.  You probably don't care.  But I have thought about it.  And made graphs.  Lots of graphs...

My 25 video game characters, arranged into order of their origin year, with some other facts I shall be analysing in too much detail, are below...

I should say at this juncture I looked at a bunch of online lists to compile this, as well as asking the people in this house for their opinions.  Any list of characters is going to be contentious, but I'm basing this on how famous they are (do a lot of people know about them?), how many games have they been in, and whether they've had films made about them.  Finally, most of the characters are player characters, not NPCs.  (I reckon these things are all pretty good indicators of how 'iconic' they are.)

First things first, year of origin.  When we look at the graph, there are two obvious peaks in the data.

These peaks are in 1986/7 and 1996-1998 (oddly there are no characters from 1997!).  Looking at the data, these peaks coincide with the US release of the NES (in 1986), and the release of the PS1 (which was on sale worldwide by late 1995).  Perhaps, then, we can infer that the most iconic video game characters come from these two systems - the NES and the PS1. (Indeed, when you look at the figures, over a quarter of the characters do come from those two systems.)

Looking at the origin formats of the characters, Sony and Nintendo consoles are responsible for 60% of the characters.  And Nintendo are also the creators of two of the characters I've given the origin "arcade".  The Microsoft category here is the Xbox and anything that debuted on Windows, which bugs me a little, it doesn't seem quite right.  Still.  The only Xbox character on here is Master Chief (who I always misread as Master Chef).  Is he really the only iconic Xbox character?  I worry that I have biased the list by being a PS geek and not an Xbox geek.  (Feel free to tell me all the Xbox characters I should have included!)

So then I was thinking, "I wonder how many of these characters are female"?  You tend to think that perhaps female game characters are more common now than they used to be.  I mean, there are a few great characters around now who are female, like Aloy, and Ellie, but what about the 1980s?  Or even the 1990s?  In total, a whopping 81% of the characters are female...

The earliest female character on the list is Samus Aran in 1986.  The "biggest" female characters are probably Jill Valentine and, of course, Lara Croft.  In the end, all of these are pretty cool strong females.  Lara Croft did start out as a bit of an oddly proportioned pinup, but these days she's all dark and, er, more normally proportioned.  There could certainly be more female characters for us to play as, though.  Perhaps if I redo this in a few years some of the newer character (like Aloy) will have made it onto the list!

Some Lara Crofts

Ok, so this is a big one - number of games.  Now there are a few clear winners here.  As you might expect, perhaps, some of the earliest characters have the most games.  But the big winner, with over 200 game appearances, is Mario.  I mean, 200?!  The next highest are Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog with 50 games each.  Mario has won this by A LOT.  Part of me wonders what happens if you take all the games and try and create one consistent piece of Mario lore.  Princess Peach would get rescued A LOT.  It would be one very weird story.  

After those big hitters we have Lara Croft, Link, Pikachu and Ryu, with c.20 games each.  But I'm still reeling from the over 200 games that Mario has been in.  I mean, Nintendo have a Mario machine churning these things out.  Some years (2014 and 2015) 14 games featuring Mario came out.  14!!!  They really are making the most of their intellectual property...

Depending on how you count them, there are nearer 250 games than 200 that feature Mario.  Yikes!

The last thing I have made a graph for is to do with film appearances by characters.  Now I know Pikachu has been in plenty of Pokemon movies, but I'm only counting Detective Pikachu (as his live action debut where he was the star).  I'm sure some of the other characters have been in random things too, but I was going for big screen Hollywood movies.  I did count how many films they'd been in (Jill Valentine won by miles, with 6 films to Lara Croft's 3).  But then I thought it would be more entertaining to see who had the highest audience rating for their films on Rotten Tomatoes..!

Sonic's scary human teeth

And the winner is...  Sonic the Hedgehog, with a score of 93/100!  Considering all the initial stress over his freaky teeth it looks like the alterations made this a big success with the fans.  I'm guessing the nostalgia value of Sonic, that Mega Drive mascot, really drove the film's success.  The same nostalgia thing probably affected Detective Pikachu (79/100).  Though it can go either way, I suppose.  If fans feel betrayed by a terrible movie then the score would be way down low.  Like, well, Super Mario Bros.

Jill Valentine gets 55.3 for her six films, Lara Croft 48.7.  The lowest scorers here are Ryu (20), Max Payne (29) and Mario (29).  What can we take from this?  I wonder if studios are getting better at making movies based on games.  I hope it's not a coincidence that the two newest movies, Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, are the highest scorers.

Kind of looking forward to various proposed video game movies. Especially Uncharted. Though not so sure about Tom Holland as Nathan Drake...  (I like him but I've always seen Drake as more of a Nathan Fillion.)

Oh, I did include Pixels here for Pac-Man.  I know it's not really about him.  But I kind of liked it...

That's pretty much it.  Those are my thoughts.  I guess if we have to crown a 'winner' here, the most iconic character is clearly Mario, with honourable mentions to Sonic, Pac-Man, Lara Croft and Pikachu.

Happy 35th Mario!

Part of me wants to now work out how many characters are 'human' and how many are 'non-human'.  I think it's about half and half.  Aaargh.  I need to stop this now.  Just press publish and walk away.  Ok, I really am going to stop thinking about this now.  Honest.  ;-)

Completionist Challenge, update: Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Game 5/10 then!  I know the point of the challenge was that I wasn't allowed to buy any new games until I'd completed 10 I already owned, but I have to admit I bought Spiritfarer with my birthday money.  Sorry (not sorry, it's good!).  But I have completed more games than I've blogged about.  I've just been terribly lax in writing about the challenge.  I've been lax about writing at all, in August, but that's because there's been a lot of demand for the PC from other parties.  I like having the proper desk and two screens to do things.  So... here I am.  

I finished the game!

I finished Assassin's Creed Odyssey (PEGI-18) back in March (see, very lax in writing about it!) and it's important in my PS gaming history for one reason in particular - it has provided me with my first Platinum trophy!  Considering I've been playing PS games since before trophies even existed, this is pretty terrible.  Maybe this was an easy game to "platinum".  It certainly didn't have any of the impossible ships/elephants or whatever that some of the other AC games had!

Woo my first platinum!!

I think I've played all the AC games apart from Unity; I've even played Liberation on the PS Vita.  I did not enjoy Odyssey as much as Origins.  It was kind of amazing running around in Egypt, not so much running around Greece (it felt very similar to Origins, but somehow something was missing).  The Ancient Greek setting provided lots of opportunities to involve "historical characters", like Plato and Pythagoras.  Plus who doesn't love Spartans?  And it was cool to play as a woman.  (You can be Kassandra or Alexios.)

It's a weird one for the franchise since Kassandra isn't actually an Assassin.  Odyssey is set in 431-422 BC, Origins is set in 49-44 BC.  The first incarnation of the Assassins are the "Hidden Ones", set up by Bayek and Aya in Origins.  So this is an Assassin's Creed game that isn't actually about Assassins.  It's 400 years before the Assassins even existed.  Strange but true.

The worlds in these games are increasingly amazing, but there are things that break the spell.  I mean, just try and follow someone for a quest and things get silly very quickly.  You're there carefully trying to move through all the people inhabiting the world and the person you're following is just elbowing their way through everyone.  And virtually every time I tried to save someone from attackers/animals I ended up killing them.  Which was annoying.

One thing that was insane was your ability to jump off of anything and not kill yourself.  I mean, you could literally jump from any height and you'd be ok.  I know they were kind of saying you were some godlike mystical being, but still.  It was a bit daft.  

As always I didn't entirely understand what was happening, and the modern day stuff was as pointless as ever (is there anyone who ends up in those bits NOT thinking "I want to be back in the Animus"?).  But it was fun.  I just can't resist Assassin's Creed games.  With their ridiculous collecting.  And jumping around on top of buildings.  It feels like the "stealth" aspect of the games has disappeared; we're left instead with the overpowered killing of thousands.  Is that a bad thing?  I don't know. 

My rarest trophy (apart from the platinum)

That's it for game 5/10 then.  I will have to get on with blogging more.  I like blogging, and I only do it for me (hardly any posts get many readers after all).  But it's hard to get motivated sometimes.  

Must try harder...

Game Review: I Love Hue

So I was lying on my bed waiting for Seb to fall asleep, and I started browsing the Play Store to see if I could find a nice, preferably free, game to try.  And I stumbled across this...  I Love Hue (PEGI-3).  This is a mobile game, then, and we've all played it on our increasingly ageing Samsung Galaxy S7's (Edge and Not Edge).  I should say it is also available on Apple devices, and it's free on both.  (You can get rid of the ads by purchasing a Prism pack, the cheapest of which is £1.79 on Android and £1.99 on Apple.)

I Love You, I mean, I Love Hue

I have admit I do like the punnishness of the name.  Hehe.

This isn't a new game (it came out in 2017).  There's an I Love Hue Too now (released Valentine's Day this year - good work there!), which I haven't tried, but it's hard to see how it could do much to improve on this initial version of the concept.

Anyway, on to the game.  I thought it looked like an interesting puzzle game, and indeed it is.  It certainly tests your ability to recognise different shades of colours.  It's hard to explain, other than to say you have to rearrange squares of colour so they run seamlessly from fixed squares of different colours/shades.  It's easier to show you than to explain in words.  

From left to right: gradually those colours fall into place!

In the picture above, the four corner squares are anchored in place (the ones with the dots), so you have to rearrange the colours between those fixed points.

It's so weird.  You start off and you see the colours and think "I have no idea where to start with this!", then you start shuffling them round, and you get to a point where it just clicks.  It all comes together.  And your brain goes "Yay!" with a happy feeling.  And the game generally calls you an iridescent moonbeam or something, for being brilliant.

It's relaxing, it's simple, but it takes some thought.  It's a real feel good game.  I was playing it without worrying about my 'score', but Dad was playing it trying to beat the world average.  So perhaps that made it less relaxing for him, introducing an element of competition.  He did say it 'got too hard', which probably means he was finding it hard to beat the other people, as opposed to not being able to complete levels...

Admittedly it's not a game you'd spend hours playing in one sitting, but it's good for those little gaps when you just want something nice and calm.  (And at the moment in the world, I bet lots of you would like a little bit of calm.)  

I've only done 44 levels, and there are apparently over 900 in total.  It's hard to envisage many people getting all 900 levels completed.  The game isn't exactly varied enough to warrant that.  It's a bit like Sudoku in that you could probably cycle through the same few puzzles and you'd never know.  Unless you have some kind of super brain.  Ultimate memory champion.

Definitely recommend this, then.  It lets you play through the first bunch of levels without ads, but after that it plays an ad after you've solved every puzzle.  The pace of the game means this isn't as annoying as it could be, but still, 30 seconds of random ad every time you complete a level is a bit annoying.  Almost makes me want to pay to get a Prism pack so I can get rid of them.  But, hmm, maybe not.

The Prism packs, incidentally, are needed if you play loads.  Every level costs Prisms to play, and you only get a certain amount of Prisms per day when you log into the game.  If you played it a lot, you would run out.  But I have not played it enough to run out.  Maybe I'm getting old, but after a couple of levels it seems a bit hard on the old peepers.  Poor eyes, having to do all that hard work differentiating between very subtle shades of the same colour...

I'm a bright shining rainbow!

YouTuber Review: Mumbo Jumbo

Recently we started watching a YouTuber who's new to us. What with the new Nether update there's been a bit of a resurgence in Minecraft, and this guy is a brilliant Minecraft YouTuber.  Particularly if you like crazy (but amazing!) redstone builds.  

I'm talking about... Mumbo Jumbo!

At this point I should explain what redstone is, I suppose, just in case you don't know.  It basically lets you create circuits in Minecraft to perform various tasks, such as move pistons, or power minecart rails.  There are special blocks that help create complex machines, such as comparators, and repeaters.  Seb and I only have only done the simplest things with redstone - I am very proud of my trash incinerator, though I copied it from a tutorial and don't completely understand it - and Mumbo is an inspiration to learn more.

Mumbo is completely clean, no swearing, and entirely appropriate for kids of all ages.  (Including 40 year old big kids like me who still love Minecraft!!)  Plus he has friends who are equally ok, like Grian.

Some facts then.  Mumbo's real name is Oli (Oliver Brotherhood) and he is 24.  He's British (hooray, another British YouTube sensation!) and lives in Hampshire.  As of 20th July 2020 his channel has 6.24m subscribers and 1,810,823,022 views.

His top video is 1 minute 46 seconds long and features him going through 20 doors in 100 seconds.  I can only assume this is a sequel to another popular door-related video, since it is called "20 More Doors in 100 Seconds".  It has way more views than any of his other videos - 64m, with the next most popular having (only!) 18m...

I also like that the top comment on this video is as follows:

One of our favourite videos we've watched so far is where he makes a redstone contraption that uses every single block in Minecraft (every single block that existed circa 28th May 2020, anyway).  He makes a Rube Goldberg machine.  A Rube Goldberg machine is (according to Wikipedia), "a machine designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way".  In the UK we'd probably call it a 'Heath Robinson' contraption.  It has a load of silly moving parts that only exist to make the next part do something, a sort of chain reaction, with most parts not particularly achieving anything of note.  But wow, it's amazing to watch!

The other thing Mumbo does is Hermitcraft.  The Hermitcraft server is a private server for YouTubers/Twitch streamers, with 24 active "Hermits".  It was founded in 2012 and is now on Season 7.  Mumbo is the most popular of these Hermits, by YouTube subs.  Each Hermit uploads content regularly and contributes to the Series as a whole.  You can't apply to join the server, the Hermits look for other YouTubers that impress them and invite them to join.  So Mumbo's been doing it since an invite in Season 2.

He's funny, his redstone is totally mindblowing, and he's family friendly.  If you like Minecraft then definitely check him out.  If you don't like Minecraft you could check him out anyway.  Watch him going through 20 doors, if nothing else.  It's actually pretty relaxing.  :-D

Lockdown Life: What's Your Happy Music?

This week was the last 'official' week of homeschooling - we would have broken up for the holidays now, if we weren't in lockdown still here in Leicester.  Seb had a couple of days off, but we did 70 days of 'Sebbie School' in total.  Not bad, and I think maybe he's even learnt one or two things.  :-)

Thank goodness he's only 8, I would have had problems teaching him if he was much older!  Though he learns a lot of stuff I never learnt at school, particularly where grammatical rules are concerned.  (The important thing in my book is that you realise what the correct grammar is, not that you know what it's called.  Hmm.)

We would have been heading off to North Essex for our summer holiday today.  Boo!  I wanted to see Sutton Hoo!  (I know that's not in North Essex.)  And visit Colchester Zoo.  And also see my parents...  Ah well.

School mental health activity

There was one activity in the worksheets the school had provided whose results made me laugh a little.  Seb has Aspergers and his view on the world is interesting at times.  He says one day he'll be a video game composer, and he spends a lot of his time humming various songs from games.  And sometimes re-enacting them with his body.  I can't really explain it.  But he often does 'Just Shapes and Beats' with his hands.  It's kind of endearing.

Anyway, the worksheet invited him to write down four songs that made him feel good, and he choose the following:

1. ColBreakz - GoodBye (from 'Geometry Dash')

2. Kenneth Young - Pig Riding (from 'Tearaway')

3. Nitro Fun - Final Boss (from 'Just Shapes and Beats')

4. Rainbowdragoneyes - Creatures ov Deception (from 'Just Shapes and Beats')

Out of those I'd have to say the one that makes me happy is 'Pig Riding'.  Tearaway has the nicest music.  I can't say the dubstep (or whatever it is, ok, I'm old) affects me in quite the same way.  

Seb said the music made him feel 'tingley and happy :-)'.  I'm not sure what game music I'd pick if I had to pick something that made me feel happy.  I don't tend to play the sorts of games that have that sort of music in them.  Maybe this......?

What music from games makes YOU feel 'tingley and happy' inside..?

Lockdown Life: Stampy's Home School!

While the rest of the country is going into the next phase of opening up, Leicester has taken a step back into more severe Lockdown once more.  (Thanks to Covid-19 we've now had 65 days of home schooling, one week to go until the supposed start of the summer holidays...)  To cheer ourselves up, we decided that part of Seb's home schooling this week (he does 'school' every morning) would involve Stampy's Wonder Quest series.

If you have a KS2 kid this really works, since the topics are things they'd be covering at school.  Hooray!

Wonder Quest is an edutainment children's web series from Disney's Maker Studios, created by Stampy (Joseph Garrett).  There are two series of it, which aired in 2015/2016.  It's set in Minecraft, and Stampy is in his usual Stampy Cat form.  Stampy and the Wizard Keen have to go on adventures to stop the evil wizard Heinous and the evil inventor Rama.  It's a fun series to watch!  It has loads of other YouTubers guesting in it, like StaceyPlays, iBallisticSquid, EvanTube and AmyLee, who are all in their usual Minecraft skins.  

It's funny, well made, and educational!  Yes, it really is.  As part of their adventures Stampy and the Wizard Keen have to do science and maths and stuff to solve problems!  Most of the things we had from Seb's school were English and Maths, so it's good to have some fun science to think about too.  It's pretty much at his level as well.  The thing we did yesterday was something he was supposed to learn at school but hadn't because he's been at home.  

As well as the longer story-driven episodes made in Minecraft, there are short more focused educational shows called 'I Wonder', which concentrate on the 'learning bit' of the longer episode.  These are animated rather than being Minecraft-style, so Stampy is like an actual anthropomorphised cat!  Seb's been watching Wonder Quest anyway, because he wants to, but I've taken some of these 'I Wonder' clips and used them in Sebbie School.

We did four topics this week.  

Topic One: Solids, Liquids and Gases

We watched this (though why are they boiling tea in the kettle?!) and then did a sorting activity I found online.  (Basically put the items into the solid/liquid/gas categories.)

Solids, liquids and gases sorting activity

Topic Two: The Solar System

Having watched this, and learnt about the sizes of planets and the order they go in, we wrote our own mnemonic to remember the order.  And completed another printable activity I found online.

Our mnemonic was: My Very Energetic Mermaid Just Swims Under Narwhals.  (At least, at some points that was what it was, it kept changing to even more stupid things...)

The planets in order

And yes, I know he spelt Jupiter "Jwoopita", he did that on purpose because he thought it was funny...

Topic Three: Parts of a Plant

With this one we did a bit of flower dissection, which was fun - I helpfully had an African Violet plant in the kitchen that had come out in lots of flowers.  We also labelled a couple of things I found online, and stuck the bits of dissected plant onto one of them.  

I know he definitely would have been learning about plants if he'd been at school, so at least he hasn't missed out on this vital information regarding anthers, sepals and stamens.  ;-)

Parts of a plant

Topic Four: Water Cycle

I would have loved to try the experiment in this one - perhaps we'll try it if we get a sunny day next week.  For some reason Seb found it oddly difficult to remember the bits of the water cycle.  Perhaps if I make him spin his weather dial thingummy on a regular basis he'll actually remember it...

The water cycle

That's all we've done so far, then.  We might do some more.  I'd highly recommend both Wonder Quest and the accompanying 'I Wonder' shows.

Kids definitely learn better if they like and respect the person teaching them.  Going back to these Wonder Quest shows and seeing that YouTubers like Stampy place value on kids learning stuff is fantastic.  Seb enjoys them and the teaching is clear.  The whole show is really well thought out.  So thanks, Stampy!  Thanks for demonstrating to Seb that learning is important.  Thanks for placing value on educating kids.  I appreciate it.  :-D

Completionist Challenge, update, Detroit: Become Human #BLM

I've still not written about some of the other games I've completed, but this one is particularly 'of the moment' in some of the themes it covers.  I will start by saying I'm a white, middle class, Christian heterosexual girl who thinks the world would be a better place if we were all nicer to each other.  I'm coming to things from a point of ignorance, but nothing I say here is meant to offend.  (Unless you're a racist, then I don't mind if you're offended!)

Detroit: Become Human (PEGI-18), then.  It was free on PS Plus a while back and I kept meaning to play it.  I have played David Cage's other games and I like the format - interactive stories.  His games involve a certain amount of dialogue choice, and also require you to be good at pressing buttons when it tells you to (if you can't remember where triangle/square/circle/X are then you might not enjoy this!).  The games are also pretty harrowing.  I remember being harrowed by Heavy Rain.  I will never forget that bit where you have to crawl through broken glass.  I think the format works because unlike a straight story it gets you involved; you wouldn't think having to press buttons at the right time would do that, but it does.

Markus in "Detroit"

The game has a lot of flowcharts too, so you can see where the story branches, and go back to checkpoints to try and redo and get a different outcome.  I did do this a bit, but some outcomes you have to replay bits that aren't that interesting, so it's more tedious.  I mean, some bits you get to make choices that really affect the game, other times not so much.  

I started this game before the recent upswell in "Black Lives Matter" activity.  By the time I'd finished it, things had happened, and it was really making me think.  I know the comparison between androids/humans and black people/white people isn't really a comparison (androids start off as machines, after all, and black people were never anything other than people).  But the game is written with lots of bits that echo the civil rights movement in America.  

It's not a perfect allegory - I don't know what would be.  I feel justified in accepting that its intentions are right, even if it isn't perfect, due to the presence of Jesse Williams as one of the main characters, Markus.  Jesse Williams is on the board of The Advancement Project.  He's a civil rights activist.  He was executive producer on the 2016 documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement.  I like to think he saw this game and thought it might be a worthwhile project.  And if he thought that, I'm not going to start saying it has no meaning because it's a "poor allegory".

I didn't really know about the Jim Crow laws in America.  I can hardly believe that all those laws were in place into the 1960s.  I knew a little about Martin Luther King, but in my ignorance I didn't understand the depth and breadth of those horrible rules and regulations.  The game has little echoes of those laws and the abuse that people faced at the time.  The androids all have to stand in an "android section" on the bus.  At one point an android relates how he was dragged behind a car "for fun".  The androids are generally denigrated and made to do menial jobs.  It doesn't matter if they are injured, because there's always someone else to replace them.  

The game has little bits all over, like discussions about whether androids should be allowed to play professional sport.  This doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of androids, but if it's harking back to guys like Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player to play Major League baseball.  There are more obvious whacks on the head to make sure you don't miss the message.  At one point you get the choice about whether to write "I have a dream" all over the place.  And there's the Underground Railroad - all the androids want to go to Canada.  (Apparently in the early 19th century more than 30,000 black slaves escaped to Canada via the real Underground Railroad.)

The game keeps asking whether you want to try a peaceful approach, with dialogue, or whether you want to riot and start a war.  Particularly interesting in the current atmosphere of civil disobedience.

The use of the gospel song "Hold On Just A Little While Longer" was particularly poignant.  The song is by Cleophus Robinson Jr and is a beautiful, melancholic gospel song.

I find it odd that when the game came out, back in 2018, the controversy was all about child abuse.  (The trailer appeared to show a father hitting his daughter.)  I find it sad that this was the focus, when the game contained so much more that ought to make us think.  It's not like the game was making you be an abusive man and hit your child.  If a game wants to tackle issues like child abuse, or the Black Lives Matter movement, then why not?  Why shouldn't it?  It ought to be possible to talk about anything that's important in real life in a game.  Games can make you think about things more because you're not just watching, you're involved in the story.  This War Of Mine is an excellent example of this.

It seems wrong to go from here to talk about the Completionist Challenge, but I suppose I'll just summarise what I managed to do.  In the end I obtained 83% of the trophies.  I played through completely twice, to see what would happen if I did things differently, and also I did a few replays from checkpoints.  The rarest trophy I had was for spending 20,000 bonus points.  In many ways the trophies that encourage you to play in a way you wouldn't have played otherwise make me uncomfortable and seem a bit jarring, but it did mean I replayed bits more than I might have done otherwise.

Proof that I finished the game!

My rarest trophy...

I'd definitely recommend you play this.  It's well written and well acted.  And it certainly gives you a lot to think about...

That's game 4 out of 10 then!  Only 6 more to write about before I can start browsing those digital game stores again...

Go out there.  Educate yourself.  And be excellent to each other.

YouTuber Review: Northernlion

I thought I'd review another YouTuber we've been watching a bit lately as a family.  His name is Ryan Letourneau, he lives in Vancouver, and his "YouTube Name" is Northernlion.  His channel features some games you might not want smaller kids to watch (such as The Binding of Isaac) but there's plenty of content that's good for the whole family.  He's very relaxing, I could probably listen to him doing anything, maybe even commentating on watching paint dry.  We will probably never find out if this is true.  But hey.

His language has a little blasphemy (if I'm asterisking vowels again there might be some "*h my G*ds"), but on the whole he's clean.  Which makes me happy.  I don't like swearing even if it's just me watching.  Seems unnecessary...

Northernlion has 817K subscribers and he's been YouTubing since 2006.  He's married to another YouTuber, Kate LovelyMomo.  His most watched videos, with 2.2M and 1.6M views respectively, are episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" and episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac". 

Now as I said earlier, though his presentation may be family friendly, the games he plays are not necessarily family friendly.  So do be careful and think about this when choosing what to watch.  The Binding of Isaac is a 16 rated game for violence and bad language, but that doesn't really give an insight into the generally horrible nature of the thing...

At the moment he's playing Darks Souls II (PEGI-16), Call of Duty: Warzone  (PEGI-18), Super Mega Baseball 3 (PEGI-3), Landlord's Super, Monster Train, Mini Golf Club, The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ (PEGI-16) and Geoguessr.  We mainly watch him play Geoguessr, where he chats with his friend Sinvicta whilst playing.  They have played 126 games of Geoguessr against each other..!!  They're not talking about anything in particular, they're just chatting.  :-)

We've watched him play Monster Train too, which is a deck-building game a bit like Slay the Spire.  Dad has started playing this, so I guess it must be fun!  If you like that sort of thing.

We did watch one episode of Landlord's Super, which is one of the most bizarre games I've watched anyone play on YouTube.  Mainly because it's a strange 1980s simulation set in Britain.  Ryan's reading of text written in dialect is pretty hilarious.  But the thing that has been bothering me about it is this phone box.  (Stick with me.)

1980s phonebox?

The KX100 phone box was introduced in 1985 to replace the iconic red phone boxes.  The earliest kiosks had smoked glass and the old "T" logo printed on them, and the door had a coloured moulded plastic panel, bright yellow or bright green for Phonecard variants.  This clearly isn't what we are seeing here.  What we are seeing here is a 1991 revamp of the KX100, with an italicised serif font reading "Telephone" and a red moulded plastic panel and handle.  It seems unlikely that a countryside phone box would have been replaced to a KX100 anyway, I suspect that it would have remained an old style red booth.  So this phone box is WRONG!!!  I'm sure they will correct this terrible error before the game comes out of Early Access.  I certainly hope so!!!!!

Original 1980s phone box and 1991 revamp

Er, hmm, anyway... the inaccuracy of the phone booth used is largely irrelevant here.  You should watch his videos.  He's good.  :-)

Completionist Challenge, update, The Long Dark

It's been a while since my last update on the Completionist Challenge (November, yikes!), but I have gradually been working my way through some old games.  If you didn't know,  I'm trying to finish 10 games I already own before I'm allowed to buy any more.  (It's too easy to succumb to those online sales!)

Stupidly I've picked some vast open worlders that take forever, but hey.  This time I'm not going to talk about those, I'm going to talk about The Long Dark. 

It's had to say whether I have completed The Long Dark, for two reasons.  Reason one is that though I have completed Chapter 3, I haven't totally completed the game because it's not finished (there will be 5 chapters, but 4 and 5 aren't done yet).  Reason two is that the story mode is only one part of the game, with survival mode providing many more hours of tense wilderness adventure.

Finished Chapter 3!

The premise of both story and survival mode is that a weird geomagnetic event happens and your plane falls out of the sky, landing in the Canadian Great White North.  In story mode you have a particular adventure to go on, but in survival you're just basically trying to survive for as long as you can.  (Though there are also challenges you can do - I am nowhere near good enough a survivor to manage those.)

I have completed the first two chapters twice, since by the time Chapter 3 came out Hinterland had redone the first two, so it made sense to do the whole thing again.  It's wasn't exactly a hardship!  The game is immense, suspenseful, terrifying in places.  Beautiful artwork and music.  You can almost feel your toes freezing up as you trudge through the snowy woods and across the frozen lakes, through whiteouts and eerie nights filled with those magical 'northern lights'. It's so well written - I really, really want to find out what happens to Will and Astrid.

Surviving the weather is one thing (getting warm clothes, food, water, and shelter), surviving the wildlife is another thing entirely.  The animals' aggressive behaviour is explained by the weird geomagnetic phenomenon (apparently it has made the wolves angry).  Chapter 3 introduced some HORRIBLE timber wolves that gave me a lot of trouble.  The most annoying bit for me, however, was a set piece thing with a bear, which seemed to be incongruously stuck into the game as a kind of boss fight.

Despite nominally 'completing' the game (in that I completed Chapter 3), I have only managed to get 28% of the original PS trophies and 77% of the Chapter 3 trophies.  If you're interested, the rarest trophy I've managed to get (so far) is this one:

I found a bunch of supply caches, woot!

This is definitely a game I'm going to keep going back to.  Survival is compelling, though you spend most of your time looting, hoping for those cardboard matches, or that elusive crowbar.    I also like watching/listening to people playing the game on YouTube, particularly Accurize2, Meatwagon22 and Paul Soares Jr.  Despite the tension of surviving, most of the game is a slow and relaxing trudge around, looting everything within sight - as such it's a restful thing to listen to whilst working from home!

If you haven't played this, try it!  It's only £8.99 on the PlayStation store at the moment.  An absolute bargain.  :-)

So that's game number 3 out of 10 completed!

Terraria Top Trumps (Easy Mode Starter Deck)

This week Seb decided he wanted to make a Top Trumps set for Terraria.  We'd done one before for Slime Rancher, so this isn't our first foray into the world of Top Trumps.  

Our Terraria Easy Mode starter deck

There have to be either 30 or 32 cards in a proper Top Trumps deck, so we needed to make sure we had that number in our starter deck.  Also, you have to have 5 stats on each card.  We picked "number of drops", "HP", "damage", "defence" and "coins" (that last one is how much money they drop on death).

Then we made a spreadsheet of all the enemies in Terraria Easy Mode (not bosses) and copied the five stats from the Terraria wiki.  This ridiculous use of our time resulted in the following:

Easy Mode enemies in Terraria

Seb went through this list and picked the 32 he wanted (the rest might get to be an expansion deck).  These are highlighted in yellow.  Then he got me to draw out the cards and he coloured them in.  We added a little bit in the middle which said what sort of enemy they were and what biome(s) you found them in, which I kind of colour coded.

We made an image for the backs of the cards, using a picture off of the internet and the Terraria font (which is called Andy), and printed off 32 copies.  After gluing them onto the backs of the cards we started laminating!  Then cutting.  And finally - ta da! - the cards are done.

Top Trumps 1-8

Top Trumps 9-16

Top Trumps 17-24

Top Trumps 25-32

We're pretty happy with them.  And it kept us occupied for a bit.  ;-)