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 keeps me motivated to keep pushing on with my backlog of nerdy little projects and tasks.

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It's pretty difficult right now for everyone to find the time to get some board gaming done, but over Christmas we managed a few little attempts.

Up first, we gave Ca$h 'n Gun$ its first run out in quite a while. We'd played a few games of this years ago with a crappy print 'n' play version I'd made, but now we can play with a proper copy.

Of course, during the two games, I was the only player to get eliminated, though I can't remember who actually won.

After that, I introduced my sis and bro-in-law to Black Sonata, which they played co-operatively. It was pretty close, with just a few cards left, but they managed the win.

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It had been six years since I last played this game, so when I took Marvel Legendary over to Scoob's to blow the dust off of it, we decided to play with the introductory setup.

It was a pretty good job we did, as though we won, we counted just five cards left in the villain deck before the final scheme twist rocked up, which would have lost us the game.

After that, we tried The Gang for the first time. Now, none of us know anything about poker, and we failed in the first game 2-3. But we decided to play another and managed an equally tight win, flipping the score round to 3-2.

And then, I dipped my toes into the world of Munchkin for just my third play, this time with the Age Of Sigmar version.

At the end of this one, I had a bit of bad luck which denied me the win. While Me and Scoob blew most of our cards preventing Emma from winning the game, I was next in turn order, so had a good chance to win now everyone was empty.
Of course, I failed to draw a monster as I kicked the door in, and I had none in my hand to play. Then Scoob, who went next, pulled a faily low level mob and easily had enough to take the victory and reach level 10. The cheek.

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Back on New Years Eve, a bunch of us got together to try a murder mystery. This one was called Killer Christmas Party and had us investigating the death of a CEO.

There was loads of printed info to get through, and also lots of extra info that could be found on the internet through various means.

To be honest, I pretty much lost the plot and my brain switched off. So even though the murderer was discovered, I don't really remember anything or know what happened much.

I think my plan is to leave it a few years and try going through it again on my own, so that I can take my time and really plot everything out.

Of course, just like last year, we again broke out Secret Hitler for another couple of games. This saw the return of Secret Hitler proper, instead of the Secret Sith Lord version I made before.

It also saw us use, and successfully at that, a little script I'd made that delivered all of our information to us on our mobile devices. This meant there was no need for the eye-closing moment at the start of each game.

Yet again, of course, my team got spanked in both games. But it's always a laugh so I'll let it slide.

As I've been on a bit of a Batman kick the last few weeks with all the Arkham series footage I've been watching on Twitch, I thought back to a game that I bought all the way back in 2015.

At the time, I tried a little bit of it in co-op with Scoob, but we didn't get very far, and had very little urge to get back to it.

After playing through it recently, I have discovered why we did not go back to it. As it's just not that great.

The game in question is Lego Batman.

On paper, this should have been a lot of fun. You get to play as Batman and Robin in a silly Lego version of the DC Universe, in a beat-em-up style game where you explore the levels, clatter bad guys, and build weird inventions and contraptions out of Lego bricks.

In reality, it turned out to be quite a frustrating little beast to play.

Primarily, for whatever dumb reason or reasons, I actually found the controls really bad. This was especially true when you are controlling vehicles, and ultra especially true when you have to tow bombs with vehicles and release them so that they hit something you're trying to damage or destroy.

Even getting into the vehicles was a pain, as the button to do this was the same button you use to switch characters, so nine times out of ten I'd just change character rather than jump into the vehicle. It was infuriating.

I know it's a silly game, but several characters, especially Robin, are portrayed as complete idiots. Now I'm no Robin fan, so I didn't mind all that much, but it just seemed odd that Batman always came across as calm and competent, when so many other people around him were behaving in very childish ways.

I do have a couple of other Lego games, though one of them is Star Wars, which for obvious reasons will never be played.

The other one is the sequel to this game, and if it's anything like this one is, then I doubt I'll be playing that one either.

Much like with my Terraria shenanigans from a couple of years ago, I was again motivated to play a game thanks to the chaos experienced by streamer Preach recently.

The game in question this time is Prison Architect, a game I've owned for many years and never touched. The closest I got to playing it was when the multiplayer update came out, and I installed it back then hoping that Scoob and I would give it a try, but it never happened.

So it's been pretty cool to finally get some use out of it.

After a bit of research, I learned that the developers of this game changed a few years back, and a lot of people have not been happy about it. Luckily, I'd still got my old downloads from GOG, so that is the version I've played.

Like with Terraria, I didn't really want to "play the game properly" as such. I just wanted to build something. To this end, I allowed myself infinite money, and turned off failure states. Unfortunately, like Terraria, I couldn't just build something without actually having at least some gameplay, as things had to be unlocked through game progression.

Now, you might think this would make the game very easy, and in some ways it was. But the fact that I was just diving straight into a big sandbox build with no tutorials was still pretty intimidating. It didn't help that the controls of the game are bonkers, and there are no rebindable options, even through config files and such.

I suppose I could have looked at using something like GlovePie to remap everything, but whatever.

I started off with a small build for a few minimum security prisoners, and just kept adding rooms and cells until I'd got 24 settled in and seemingly happy.

It was during this time that I learned all about the regime, programs, deployments, logistics, patrols and all of the other little things that were required to keep things running smoothly and with as much automation as possible.

While all that was going on, I started building a second cell block, this time to take 40 prisoners, who would be a slightly rougher bunch and would be placed in medium security. This included an extra perimeter fence and extra dogs to patrol among them.

I didn't add them slowly like I did with my first bunch of hoodlums, and instead opened the prison up to all 40 at the same time. As you would expect, chaos quickly ensued, with these prisoners beating each other up and leaving blood trails all through the cell block as well as in the cafeteria.

Absolute savages, ruining my nice clean floors. How dare they! And ruining my 29 day no incident streak to boot. Just rude.

It was always my intent to build a third block for high security prisoners, with armed guards and sniper towers, but soon after adding the second bunch of prisoners, and getting them to settle down, I've decided to move on. Believe it or not, I actually spent quite a bit of time over 6 days just getting to this point, so it's had enough time out of me for now.

If I come back to it, I might even try the more up to date version. I mean, I know people have commented on how buggy it has been since the devs changed, but it's not like I was free of them using this version.

Primarily, I had constant issues with the graphics flickering at the top of the screen that just kept happening at random times. For some weird reason, taking a screenshot would not show the flickering, so I had to snap this issue with my camera.

I've never seen weirdness like that before, and hopefully never again.