The Washington Post recently published an in depth look at Animal Crossing New Horizon’s economy that I wanted to share.
Love the presentation of the article in the Washington Post app
It’s crazy to read about the “get rich quick” schemes and intense trading players are doing to bring in massive amounts of bells. Here I am, forgetting every week to even buy turnips (I don’t want to time travel), and struggling to pay for my second house upgrade. I’ve fallen off from playing regularly pretty quickly, unfortunately. It’s relaxing to jump in every now and then, but I’ve never been any sort of power player. It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve last checked in, and despite setting a reminder to buy turnips this past Sunday I still missed my chance. It’s probably for the best, because even had I bought them I’d forget to sell them before they rot.
Anyway check out the linked article, it’s a good read, even if you’re not a power player. It’s a window into another world.
When I first heard about Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics for the Nintendo Switch, a forgotten memory flashed into my mind. I recalled browsing the cheap PC games at Wal-Mart or Circuit City and coming home with a disc that featured ‘hundreds’ of games on it. You’d pop in the disc and browse through a directory of games, fooling around with most of them for mere seconds, before finding maybe two or three on the disc that were actually entertaining. In fact, most of them would be shareware, demos of full games that you were encouraged to pay more for.
Without knowing too much about Clubhouse Games upfront, I kind of assumed that there might be only a handful of games worth playing. After spending some time with the game, however, I found that assumption to be wrong. Sure, there are a lot of games that aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t like the ‘toy’ games, such as curling, baseball, and boxing, but the board games make up for the minigames that feel shoveled in.
Clubhouse Games does a really good job of introducing you to the rules and strategies of games you might not be familiar with. I had always thought that backgammon seemed unapproachable, but my wife and I played a game and caught on really quickly. We’ve developed a bit of a rivalry through some of the games, and it’s incredibly easy to switch from game to game for an evening of light fun.
That said, it’s incredibly clear from the promotional material which games support local multiplayer. Luckily the breakdown in EGM’s review makes it easy to see which games support same screen multiplayer.
Here’s a list of the games included in the collection
The menus and overall presentation of the collection are clean and straightforward, which is appreciated. There’s not much going on outside of the games, but there’s just enough to give the collection personality. There are some cheesy intros to the games which offer some background for the games which can get annoying, however they’re easy enough to skip that it never became bothersome.
For $40 Clubhouse Games offers a variety of family fun that’s easy to jump right into. I think it’s a great game to have in the bag for entertaining yourself during a flight (once that becomes a thing again), but it also makes for some great light entertainment while camping. For that reason I’d say that Clubhouse Games is a great addition to just about any Switch library, however it is likely best suited for those looking for easy to pick up family entertainment. I certainly wish I would have had a game like this for long family road trips in the minivan as a kid. Instead, I had:
Did you know you can rent UHD Blu-rays from GameFly now? I didn’t. I recently re-upped my GameFly subscription after a hiatus and was surprised to see the 4K Blu-ray discs available.
UHD Blu-rays are still rather expensive, usually $25-30 each, so it’s nice to have the option to rent one on occasion. The last one I purchased was 1917, which was great, but I’m not huge on rewatching movies, and if I do it’ll probably be via the digital code that came with the disc. I’d much rather rent a Blu-ray to watch a movie in its highest quality rather than buy one. I’ve rented 4K movies through a variety of streaming services and on a variety of services, but the experience has never compared to the crisp, clean picture and high quality sound that the discs offer.
I’m on the $22.95 2-disc plan right now, getting ready to start The Last of Us Part II thanks to GameFly. I usually use one of my two slots to play a game I really want to play, and the other to take a chance on something I definitely wouldn’t buy otherwise (that’s Truck Driver for the Xbox One at the moment). So it might be worth it for me to occasionally use my “I might not like this” rental slot to watch a movie now and then.
GameFly has one disc plans for $15.95 a month, and they eventually allow you to upgrade beyond two disc plans once you’ve been a member for at least two consecutive months. In comparison, Netflix’s DVD.com plans only offer non-4K Blu-rays for $9.99 and $14.99 a month for one and two disc plans respectively. GameFly is of course focused on video games, explaining the higher pricing, but the movie rentals are a nice bonus.
In the process of writing this post I also discovered that RedBox offers some UHD Blu-ray rentals for $2.50 per night, but the availability seems scarce, at least at locations near me.
I started playing The Last of Us back on the PS3 but it never really hooked me. The Last of Us Remastered was one of the first purchases I made when I first picked up a PS4 Pro, however I again played for an hour or so and fell off. With all of the hype (and controversy) surrounding the release of The Last of Us 2, I decided to dive back in, and I’m glad I did!
Even when I played it on the PS3 I thought the game looked great, but on a PS4 Pro it’s one of the better looking games I’ve played. The environments are incredible, and littered with small things that can spark conversation between the characters. I would wander into a room to find Ellie playing darts which made her character feel more like a real person, and not just a tag a long character. These moments and the detailed environments also improve the pacing of the game. There are many intense moments that will increase your heart rate, so it’s nice to have moments to calm down despite the darkness of the world. The bright lighting and signs of normalcy interspersed throughout the world really distinguish The Last of Us from other post apocalyptic game worlds. Ellie asking Joel about life before the outbreak humanize the experience, it’s not all violence and darkness (though there’s plenty of each for sure).
The variety of environments and encounters make the world of The Last of Us feel more real. It’s not filled with the same textures, which makes the game feel like an actual world rather than an assortment of levels that make for good combat zones. That said, the areas in which combat take place allow for a variety of ways to make it through them. You can try to sneak by without engaging anyone, you can sneak around and shiv people silently, or you can go in guns blazing. Each approach feels great, though at times ammo can be scarce. I played on easy, so the guns blazing approach worked well for me, but there were still times I found myself needing to scrounge around for ammo, and toward the end of the game I found myself worried I might run out. Luckily, I never did which kept the game from getting frustrating.
The story of The Last of Us kept me engaged throughout. I always wanted to see what would happen next, though sometimes I had to force myself to step away to gather my thoughts. There’s a lot to take in, and it can weigh on you emotionally, which is something not a lot of games can do successfully. I feel like the weight of the story is similar to the Life is Strange series, as those are probably the only other games that made me want to step away from the game to unpack my emotions.
In the end, I think I’m going to take a bit of a breather before working through the Left Behind DLC, and ultimately firing up The Last of Us 2. If you haven’t had a chance to play The Last of Us, I highly recommend it, even if you play on easy it’s worth having the experience.
We ventured out to the same area to camp last weekend, however it was much busier so we had to drive a few miles past our preferred camping spots. We were starting to get anxious that we wouldn’t be able to find any at all when we stumbled across this location. It wasn’t perfect, it was pretty close to the road, but I think it worked out okay. There was a nice spot where we set up chairs on the river bank which was incredibly relaxing.
When the Steam Link device was released I was pretty excited about what it promised. It allowed you to stream your Steam library from your PC to any TV in the house, which sounded great for someone who wasn’t a huge fan of always sitting in a computer chair at a desk. Once I got the hardware, however, I was disappointed from the start. I never had a great experience with it, even though I had a quality router. It’s highly recommended that both the PC and Steam Link are connected to the router via ethernet, but that wasn’t going to work for me.
While listening to a podcast a few days ago I was made aware that there’s now a Steam Link app for iOS. This discovery happened to coincide with the release of Persona 4 Golden on Steam, and I was thrilled to give it a try. Persona is a game that doesn’t suffer if a little bit of input lag or drops in video quality are introduced. I quickly got the app up and running, and plopped my iPad on a table in front of our porch swing to give it a go. It worked surprisingly well, even with my desktop only being connected via WiFi. I didn’t get any pixelation or hiccups during the hour I played on the iPad. From there I got Steam Link set up on my Apple TV in the living room and continued on for another hour or so, without any issues.
I then dug out my Steam Link hardware and set it up to see if I’d get the same experience, but unfortunately little had changed from the last time I tried to use it. It was a pixelated mess, hardly playable at all, despite it being set up closer to my router than the Apple TV or my iPad.
The only downside to using an Apple TV for Steam Link is that there’s no mouse support. I have another Apple TV in my office and wanted to play Command and Conquer Remastered on it, only to find out there’s not a way to use a bluetooth mouse through the Apple TV. I ended up connecting the mouse to my desktop and used a bluetooth keyboard connected to the Apple TV and it worked, however I’m not sure it would work well (if at all) from the living room.
I ended up spending some time running an ethernet cable into my office and setting up an ethernet switch to finally wire everything up, which did make the Steam Link usable. From there I decided to give PS4 Remote Play another try on my iPad and MacBook, and while it works, it’s a much lower quality experience compared to the Steam Link app.
I played some of The Last of Us Remastered on my MacBook in the living room as my wife was watching Netflix, and while it worked, it certainly wasn’t an ideal experience. During scenes with lots of action I experienced heavy pixelation and some lag, and I often had to pause to let the quality improve so that I wouldn’t die. I didn’t adjust the display settings on my PS4 Pro (I had it set to prioritize higher resolutions) so that may have played a part in my experience, but the best way to play The Last of Us is on a TV anyway, as the scenery is part of what makes the game special.
These remote play experiences has made me wish that the experience were better for the Xbox. As far as I’m aware there’s not currently a way to stream an Xbox to an iOS device or MacBook (outside of the Xcloud beta or running Bootcamp), and even trying Xbox’s remote play on my desktop has been a poor experience. I have yet to try since running ethernet to everything, but my desktop is in the same room as my Xbox, so there’s little reason to try. I did try streaming to the Xbox app via BootCamp on my Mac and it was unplayable.
I hopped on GTA Online last night just to fool around in the world. It was nice to just goof off without worrying about running businesses or missions trying to make money. I probably flew around in a helicopter for a good hour, just following people around taking in the chaos before just about everyone on the server got bumped out of the blue. In the first video I was just waiting by an AFK player (one of only two others on the server at that point) when I saw a dot approaching on the map and tried to figure out where it was coming from. They made quite the entrance.
In the second video I was following around a blimp as a player in an Opressor made attempts to land on it. I think the blimp pilot didn’t appreciate all of the attention as they tried to slip away.
avideogamelife 