Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in. I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it really does help motivate me to keep doing things.
If you want to read about a specific subject, click the "Filters & Pages" button in the top right.

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It's been a slow, strange few months, during which I should have been rattling out achievements to document here. However, I have found myself completely unable to play computer games because of some bad RSI in my mouse-clicking fingers. And the hot weather, as it does every year, really put a dampener on my painting.

And yet, there has been a bit of movement in the tabletop gaming arena, especially these last couple of weeks.

Though I'm supposed to be painting my 6mm Tyranids, I instead got the urge out of nowhere to paint my 40K Imperial Guard characters. I rattled the officers off in short order, but my motivation ceased when I got to the Commissars.
That has pretty much been my only 40K involvement for the past 6 months, other than my decision to correct some big fuck ups with some green stuff that I made nearly 11 years ago now. I had never been happy with my hair attempt on either model, so I tore that crap off, and will now have to put them both in the stripping pot so I can re-paint them at a later date.

I have continued to feel the urge to get my Epic armies to the tabletop again, but I'm still struggling to fully work on a new ruleset.
I have instead been doing some work on preparing the armies. I've freshly basecoated all of my Evil Sunz, as well as re-basing a lot of Orks and Imperial Guard. As I had never painted one before, I decided to paint the Mega Gargant first, which was an interesting challenge, though I've also done the Fighter-Bommerz. I'll next be moving on to the rest of the red ladz, but first I figured I should finish the Trygons that had been sitting half-painted since some time back in March.

The main reason that I'm really feeling Epic right now is that I got tempted to pick up some Eldar again. I used to have an Eldar army back in the 90s, but Scoob ended up with it at some point. I can't remember how or why, but I've always regretted getting rid of it.

But now, I'm looking to rebuild my pointy-ears, and I've started with winning two armies from ebay. Some of those old models are in a pretty bad way, and they're going to need some serious TLC to get them up to speed.

However, with some cheating, I think I can currently make the following army:
3 Titans, 3 Tempests, 4 Wave Serpents, 6 War Walkers, 2 Prism Cannons, 2 Doomweavers, 3 Warlocks, 7 units of Guardians, 4 units of Jetbikes, 2 units of Vypers, 4 units of Tremor Cannons, 3 units of Lascannons, 5 units of Wraithlords, 2 units of Exarchs, 1 unit of Rangers, 1 unit of Dark Reapers, 1 unit of Swooping Hawks, 1 unit of Dire Avengers, 2 units of Fire Dragons, 2 units of Harlequins, 2 units of Striking Scorpions, 1 unit of Howling Banshees, and 1 unit of Wraithguard.

There are a few things I'd still like, such as the very important Avatar, but getting the forces I've already got table-ready will be a task all on its own. Oh well. Better get back on ebay...

It has taken me far too many months, but I've finally completed Bioshock for the first time. I wish I'd been more into this, but it just didn't grab me in any way, and it felt like I really had to grind my way through it.

The game is primarily a first person shooter, though it's also supposed to have horror elements. I found the horror elements entirely lacking, much like I did for System Shock 2, which this game is apparently the spiritual successor of. Granted, the game world is all kinds of messed up. But there was nothing scary here at all.

The game is set some decades ago, and in it you play as a guy who finds himself in an underwater city that has fallen into a state of absolute depravity and chaos. There, he is drawn into the latter stages of a war between two people and their followers, who both wish for control of the city.

Overall, I found this game very mediocre. I can see why people really like it, or at least, why they really liked it at the time. But for me, I found the story too boring and bland to hold my attention. It was also delivered in one of the most irritating ways, in the form of audio logs. The few NPCs you interact with were pretty crappy characters also, essentially pointless in the long run.

Neither did the gameplay feel particularly great. When I play an FPS, I want to be able to go in all guns blazing, but this game doesn't allow you to do that. For a start, I found ammo to be very scarce, especially early on. It also takes a crap-ton of time to reload when your gun is empty. For whatever reason, I also found there to be a funny feeling to the mouse movement, which I couldn't fully eliminate no matter how I tinkered. All this just added up to the game being an empty FPS experience for me.

It doesn't really fill me with any great motivation to push on and play the other games in this series, which I do have. But if I do, hopefully they will grab me better than this one did.

There was recently a great deal of gameplay on Twitch of Terraria, as it received its final big update in the form of 1.4. This got me intrigued, and I re-installed it for a laugh. I started out just mining and building and exploring, but I soon realised several days had passed where this thing had absorbed all of my free time, without me really getting anywhere.

To play this game all the way through again would take days and days, and as there are many other games I need to play that I've never played before, I freed myself of its grip and uninstalled it. Good job too, as I had quite a sore hand from all the clicking.

Shame. If I had more time, and didn't have a list of well over 100 games I need to play first, I think I'd have liked to go through it again. I guess I can always come back to it.

In about 20 years...

Problem is, this is not the only really long game I want to play again. I've recently read the Witcher books, watched the Netflix show, and have been watching people play Witcher 3 online. And I really want to play it again myself...

Must...

Resist...

Playing an old style Final Fantasy game is something I was trying to motivate myself to do all last year. Not only did I feel like I should play the original VII again, but I also never finished my last play through of number VIII, nor have I played number IX again since I bought it a few years ago. However, my issue was that I felt like I should play them. Not that I necessarily wanted to play them. And that held me back.

But after playing Final Fantasy VII Remake, I just couldn't stop myself from firing up the original game, just to play through the opening Midgar section as a comparison. I guess I should have played it before playing the remake, but I never found the time or determination back then.

The other thing I decided to do was to try out a few mods, to spruce up the graphics a bit. Besides, that made sense, as to get my old cd version of the game working on more modern Windows, I was going to have to install some extra stuff anyway. So, after a bit of tinkering to get the game running, I re-entered the original Midgar for the first time in 19 years. Thinking about it, that's roughly half my life ago.

Holy shit.

Gotta admit, it felt pretty bizarre playing this again after all this time. I had these weird conflicting feelings, as if I'd played it very recently, but also not played it for a lifetime. It all felt so familiar, but at the same time there were really simple things that I could not remember, like "which way was it to Aerith's house again?".

Some of the more interesting moments I had while playing this part of the old game again were the ones that had direct comparisons with the new game. I liked seeing just how they'd taken those old moments and updated them.
I also caught some things that I must have seen years ago but had forgotten all about, such as a single line from Jessie in the Avalanche basement, where she worries about whether she made the bomb correctly. That one line, and the subsequent idea that perhaps Shinra is toying with our main characters, was something I never picked up on all those years ago. I guess that's because neither that truth, nor Jessie's fear of whether she made a mistake, are mentioned again in the old game. In contrast, in the remake, they really fleshed out that part.
I wonder how many other little lines and hints I missed or have forgotten about in all these years since?

Very probably, I will never know the answer to that question, as while I didn't mind jumping into this again, I still feel no great pull to continue it. Unless something changes as I continue to grow ever older, it's likely I'll not play it ever again, to be honest. So much time has passed, and my taste in games has changed so much, that I can't commit to a full playthrough.

But if it never happens, I'll always have my very fond memories.

Here's just a few images that compare old and new:

This 'ere next game is one I first saw a very, very long time ago when I was still in school. My mate Scoob used to babysit for one of his neighbours, and on one occasion he asked me to join him. This was because he wanted to show me this game, which was on his neighbour's PC. I could be wrong, but that may have been the first time I ever saw a PC, as back then I only had a Commodore Amiga. I remembered not being impressed at first, as the computer was running MS-DOS, and I had no real interest in a black screen with white writing.

But then he fired the game up. And I was intrigued. Because this game was Sam & Max Hit The Road.

See, back then I quite liked silly point and click adventures like Monkey Island. In fact, my mate Dave and I even tried making one on some Amiga software called Grac. But that software was garbage and the experiment didn't go very well.

It was, however, a very long time until I would catch sight of this game again. More than twenty years in fact, when I bought it from GOG in 2015. Yes, I've owned it nearly 5 years, and it's a fairly short-ish game, so it would have been good to play before, but I've never really had the motivation to play it as an adult. I just don't like silly point and clicks anymore, mostly due to the stupid moon logic, which of course, this game is chock-full of.

In the game, you control Sam and Max, members of the Freelance Police, as they are sent to rescue a bigfoot from a power-hungry country music star. It sounds bonkers, and it is bonkers. Some of the locations and things you have to do are ridiculous, but that's just the kind of game it is.

The characters and writing are enjoyable and funny, based on an earlier comic I believe, and these helped me get through the game. Because, not gonna lie, I really needed the help. I very quickly got tired of looking at everything, talking to everyone, trying to pick everything up, trying to use everything with everything else, just to see if I could advance any one of the very silly moon logic puzzles. I even got a sore hand from all the mouse clicking.
Nor am I ashamed to admit that I had to use a walkthrough at a few points, because I just couldn't be bothered.

It really is a shame I didn't get to fully play this when I was a lot younger when I may have appreciated it a lot more. But this kind of game is just not for me any more.

<Old Stuff>

Since I changed the "feel" of my site last year, these next few pictures have not existed online. However, I want them out there as a method of shaming me into actually pulling my finger out.

These pictures show the state of all my wargaming armies, or at least, how they looked the last time I lined them all up for photos. Not a great deal has changed for most of them, which indicates just how much of a task I still have in front of me in order to get them all done.

Here are my 6mm Epic armies. It's one of my deepest gaming regrets that I have not really shown this game any love for the last decade. I mean, I used to really enjoy playing the old Epic Space Marine, and my later botched attempts at reviving it. Plus, I have so many models, including some Andrayada from Dark Realm Miniatures that I was working on making up my own rules for.

A lot of the models that I have painted for this game were done back in the 1990s, so are really crappy and in dire need of being updated. Therefore nothing is really up to my current standard other than the Khorne and Nurgle parts of my Chaos army, while hopefully the Tyranids will be done at some point sooner rather than later.

Here are my 40K armies. I'm further along at getting these painted compared to my Epic armies, but that's not really saying much. All of my Tyranids are done, and the vast majority of my Space Marines. I've just got to paint the other Marines that I added to the army a while back.

That only really leaves 3 armies, though I only count them as 2. All the way back from when I first started to collect them, it has always been my intent for the Eldar and Tau to be one allied army. Of course, as is typical of me, I didn't play anything of 6th or 7th editions, when these two were actually allowed to ally together and were supposed to be quite powerful. But hey, I don't care. If I do get round to using them in 8th I'll probably still throw them together, even if it means losing a lot of their special rules.

I do also have a small number of Orks and Sisters Of Battle, but they're nowhere near full armies, and I don't intend on making them so. Got enough to get through already...

Of my 40K armies that are not yet fully painted, only a few models are even slightly worthy of having their picture taken. And here they are: