In 2021, I wrote a blog post about how I believed that free will is the result of the uncertainty principle, that our brains are somehow affected by the wave function collapse, thereby giving us true free will. I no longer believe that – but it also doesn’t matter.
The universe is plenty random and you won’t need free will at all.
I have read and watched videos about how the brains works, and it seems to me that the inner workings of the brain is not governed by quantum mechanics after all. Although we have 86 billions neurons and thus they are really tiny indeed, they still operate at too much of a macroscopic level to be affected by the uncertainty principle. The wave function is always collapsed in our brains.
The brain is sculptured during a lifetime both by genes and by how the environment influences it. This creates the personality you have today, with all the opinions and decisions it spawns. I have discovered that I tend to make decisions in exactly the same way, even across months or even years.
This is a blog series about the latest video games I’ve played recently, with my hidden personal notes. I decided to stop my balanced reviews, since I couldn’t escape the feeling that almost no one was reading them.
Some years ago there used to be a running joke about the first person shooter, Duke Nukem Forever, having been in production for so many years that it was probably never going to be released. Eventually it was actually released, but it still got me thinking – what other things has been postponed over and over?
Some things, like fusion and flying cars, have had the curse of always being 10 years away. If any of the things below makes it, I will try to remember adding a strikethrough effect to it.
This is my third post in a series about blogging and playing PC games.
My first blog saw the light of day in 2011. I had developed my own crude WordPress theme and had some moderate success blogging mostly about MMORPG. I actually had a few visitors and even some comments to begin with. Then it fizzled out – and half a year later, I finally killed my blog.
Four years later, I had another look at my old blog posts. I thought they were written well enough for me to revive the blog and continue. I spent half a year developing the WordPress theme you see here. I wanted it to not only look good, but also have a lot of features – many of which I don’t even use myself.
But as I relaunched in 2015, I also made a vow to myself. Don’t ever give up on the blog again.
During the years since 2015, the audience for this blog has been so limited that I would probably have killed it several times over, had I not made that vow. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to keep it going. I have written tons of impressions post about PC games, a little bit about Commodore 64 music, and some science stuff too. I also announced some of the blogs posts in various social media.
You would think that kind of persistence would have garnered an audience over time.
7/10Developer: Uppercut Games | Released: 2022 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure
This will be the last entry in my blog series with balanced reviews.
This sequel to Submerged is essentially more of the same. The goal is different – put a big seed in an enormous flower located in large buildings – and it has more collections as well as a few more features, including the brother now joining in on the adventure. But other than that, it’s still relaxed climbing, jumping and sailing, and again it often feels a little bit too easy.
With the brother now steering the boat, the two siblings sail between buildings to climb them for various objectives. The main one is lifting a beach ball of a seed into a big flower to change the organic flow of the building, but there are also other objectives such as finding relics, collections, books with the history of the city, boat boosters, light a fire in towers, discovering landmarks and animals, etc.
The most noticeable new features are mostly related to the boat. It can now drag bridges and platforms out with a rope, and it’s also where you see the brother raise relics with an anchor. The siblings are randomly in control when going on a climbing adventure in a building. That was a really cute feature, although the main story buildings with the seeds are for the sister only, as that part relates directly to her.
This game received an overwhelmingly positive user rating on Steam. Although I agree it was very well done, with a amazing drawn style that reminded me of both Sable and the graphical novel art by Moebius, and an intriguing climb of the tower of babel while deciphering glyphs to understand the languages of the people living there, it did have a few things that dragged it down ever so slightly for me.
As a true point-and-click adventure with a minimal inventory, I had to walk around and collect more glyphs from people and objects. After watching some of them used in situations that could give a hint about what they mean, a notebook is opened with about 3-6 glyphs and a few drawings. Time to guess what that set means. The more glyphs guessed, the easier it is to understand what you need to do on that level.
There are about five levels to climb in the enormous tower, and each level have several interconnected locations like in oldskool adventure games. It’s not just clicking objects to pick up and use, sometimes there are genuine stealth sequences too. Typically a ghostly destination figure is shown that, when clicked, makes your characters sneak over there – hopefully without being spotted.
