Dave the Diver

Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.

I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.

Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.

The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.

So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.

I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.

The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.

Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.