🧵 1/3
August 31, 1983: The Appalachian Trail followed some dirt roads through a pleasant farm valley encircled by mountains and reentered the forest to begin a rather taxing climb up to Holts Ledge, the first real mountain it had thus far traversed in New Hampshire. It kept turning onto one woods road after another, and each was a bit steeper than the preceding one.
The next morning at Mersin heavy rain surprised us. The sky over the sea was super dark black. The first bad weather wave we sat out in the tent, then, around midday, we decided to start cycling... Only some km later we where lucky to wait underneath a roof of a supermarket until the next cloudburst was over. To Erdemli, our destination for this day, we cycled mostly on the promenade directly along the coast or on the big road D400, totally easy 😎
At Erdemly we cooked dinner in the big and very clean city parc. We knew about the rainy night and pitched our tent, cheeky as we got, in front of a park office... 😇🏕️ #turkey#cycling#bikepacking#biketouring#cyclinglife#adventure#traveling#pedalandexplore#cyclingaroundtheworld#adventuretravel#exploringbybicycle#globetrottingonwheels#travelphotography
Made a second object for throws. This flare is not for lighting, because the protagonist has a flashlight... this item is a tool to distract the creatures that live on this planet
Her Interactive is about to release a banger, on 7th of May! 🤯 After temporary fall from the most unfortunate entry, they rise from their knees and fly very high. Welcome 34th game in the series:
It's a HUGE upgrade, when you compare these cinematics with other ND visual novels. Can't wait to get a feel of the gameplay that they, most likely, improved in accordance to general feedback as well.
There is so much to do in and explore new locations: in 3D, no less! Essentially, you can have a ride to Prague as the detective Nancy Drew in this game and play brain crackers, haha. :blobcattea:
This week we explore an idyllic Iberian island, take pictures of birds, and rage against the capitalists destroying nature for a short-term profit - all my favourite things!
This is a 28 page “temple-crawling adventure” written by Munkao ostensibly for Into the Odd and Cairn (but actually largely system-agnostic), and set in the South-East Asian inspired world of Kala Mandala. I don’t think transferring it into other settings should be that much of an issue, as long as one can come up with a reason why there’s a vaguely Asian-coded monastic community around to set this at. My personal setting is set around a sort of crossroads of cultures so I have absolutely no issue with that), and this might fit in great in some of the areas I haven’t worked out that much yet.
The mission as it is is not one that lends itself to the usual loot and pillage gaming: Het Thamsya is a fledgling temple school in a larger collective, dedicated to the path of Automata. The founder of this school has nearly finished a decade long meditation, but giant (belying the title) wasps have created a nest in the back of the building while everyone else was busy not disturbing the meditator. Your mission now, if you should accept it, is to carry the meditating monk out of there, without waking him.
The complications arise from the guards set by your mission objective (automata of various kinds), the wasps, and a bunch of other intruders that have entered without anyone knowing. Interestingly the wasp nest is detailed much more than you’d think, and there are things going on in there that are way more complicated than what you’d expect, as there’s some bizarre bio-horror twist lying in wait. Which makes for a fascinating chart of faction relations based on the instincts of the wasps and the commands left for the automata and how they interact with one another.
I do feel like I am missing some context for the world of Kala Mandala, as I am not quite sure what some of the things reference. On the other hand it’s easy to just plug in whatever association comes up and go with it. The scenario offers a compelling mission and plenty of complications to make for some interesting play. I think this might be interesting to play with multiple groups to see how either of them make it through.
Our route, the only existing road, led us all the way up into the mountains. Since we hadn't seen snow in a long time, it was kind of exciting. But the most amazing part of being there was smelling the cool, fresh air without air pollution from cars and trucks. Although it looked on the map like it should have been a big road, there was barely any traffic. When we arrived at the mountain pass (2250m), a very nice downhill awaited us. Wow, this was great 🤩
Around midday we reached Yüksekova, where we had lunch and bought a Turkish sim card. In the afternoon we cycled on with the idea of finding a nice campspot and finishing the cycling day early. It turned out to be super difficult to find a spot to pitch our tent. We cycled along the Nehil river. The land around the river was extremely wet and muddy, not a good idea to pitch the tent. Then the landscape changed from wide swampland and farm fields to a narrow valley with steep rocky mountains on both sides, also no possibility to pitch the tent. So we kept pedaling and pedaling. Finally, we saw a flat and grassy place 20m away from the road. We pushed the bikes up there when we suddenly realized we were being watched from the mountain peak. Armed military men shouted down to us 'yallah, yallah,' sounding like 'get your butt off here...' and that's what we did. We almost lost hope. Finally, we found a place where we saw no military posts or guards around and where we could set up a bivouac (no tent).
We cooked a very delicious meal with lots of veggies and fell asleep immediately 😴
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Contrary to our fears, the border crossing went very smooth.
Of course we had to -still on the Iranian side - remove the bags from the bicycles and slide them through the x-ray scanner.
At the passport and visa control, the officer tried to convince us that our visa had expired. 'No, that's not the case' we explained and showed him that he should not consider the time period for picking up the visa, but rather calculate 90 days from the date on the entry stamp. He kept the visas (for Iran it is on a separate paper, as some countries would refuse entry when having an iranian entry stamp in the passport) and gave us back our passports.
In the next room, we were greeted in High German and immediately led to the next x-ray scanner. All the locals, with their worn bags, old suitcases, and dozens of plastic bags full of tomatoes, had to wait. We felt totally uncomfortable and so sorry when we saw how the Turkish border guards treated these people.
As quickly as possible, we packed all the bags from the bike into the scanner and were then asked to push the entire bicycle through 🤣 Wow, we had never experienced anything like this before! - too bad we didn't have a photo of that! - then got the entry stamp and off we went...
The first thing Fiona did, on turkish ground, was removing the headscarf 💁♀️
The temperature was quite chill up there and the snow was within reach. From the border we pedaled ~15km uphill until almost sunset and until we found a suitable campspot for this night 🏕️ 😴
🧵 1/6
September 1, 1983: The trail down the far side of Smarts Mountain was in worse shape than the ascent had been, but what did that matter to a man surrounded by that kind of magnificence? The AT lunged downward across more of those dripping, mossy rocks.
Did you know that an inofficial fan demo of "Monkey Island 5" was released in 2004 called "The Return of LeChuck"?
Released by Team Flibble Studio It was created with AGS and can be run on ScummVM!
Thank you all for these cool titles for Yip Quest!
Even if one of these titles was not chosen as the title for the first Yip Quest game, it could be still taken for one of Yip Quest's successors (with mentions in the credits, of course!)
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow is the eighth and final game in April's Humble Choice Bundle. It's a 2.5D pixel-art point-and-click horror adventure set in Victorian England.
You play as Thomasina Bateman, a grave-robber... sorry, "barrow-digger", who's been asked to come to a small village in rural England to excavate a barrow (a large, round, ancient grave).
When she arrives by train in the village of Bewley, the man she's there to meet is nowhere to be found, and the locals claim to know nothing of the site known as "Hob's Barrow", with the mystery unfolding from there.
In this case, the narrative does lift the game above my resistance to pixel-art games, but it's definitely a game I'd need to be in the mood for.