I finally had a few hours to play some VR while the kids were out of the house a few weekends ago. I only had a limited amount of time though, so I decided to go with a short game that I could hopefully finish in a single sitting, instead of trying Aces of Thunder again. I was looking forward to Aces of Thunder (literally counting down the days till its release), but after a couple days of playing it after release, frustrations with the controls and lack of any tutorials put me off of playing it. I decided to put it off to the side in the hopes that it would be updated with a tutorial or more accessibility options.

Not having the time to learn Aces of Thunder, I settled on a game that's been in my back-log for quite a while: the slice-of-life, BAFTA-award-winning indie game Before Your Eyes. This is a novel VR experience that is controlled entirely through eye-motion and blinking. No controller needed! The core conceit is that the game is made up of a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and when you blink your eyes, the game advances to the next vignette. As such, the protagonist's life literally "flashes before your eyes".

Maybe I'll be able to come back to Aces of Thunder next week, when my 4-year-old is with his grandparents visiting my sister out of state?

Life moves quickly, and often feels like a series of "blink-and-you-miss-it" events.

Blink and you miss it

I was expecting a game about witnessing a person's entire life, seeing relationships come and go, children grow up, pets and loved ones growing old and dying, and so forth. It was pitched to me as emphasizing the idea that life happens fast, and that there are moments that feel like you "blink and you miss them". Like one minute I'd witnessing the birth of a child, and 2 blinks later, that child would be going to the first day of school, and then a couple blinks later, graduating high school and going off to college. Before I know it, I'd be seeing the birth of grand children. I'd be left wondering what happened to all the time in between. It would supposedly be about living in the moment and trying to treasure the time you have as you're experiencing it, because that time will be fleeting and gone before you know it. And maybe there would be branching plots based on unconscious decisions such as whether your gaze lingers on certain things, or how long you stay in a particular vignette.

I was expecting something along the lines of a VR version of The Inner Light.

How would life be different if you studied instead of playing video games all day? (Or vice-versa?)

The game is still about these things, to some extent, but it goes in a direction that I totally did not expect. I was expecting a story that is sentimental and maybe nostalgic, and just a general vision of the highs and lows of life in general. What I got instead was something that was a lot more specific and a lot more heartbreaking.

As frequent readers should be aware, I love turtles and tortoises. They are my favorite family of animals. I've had pet tortoises for almost my entire life. On top of that, my next door neighbors have a pet tortoise, my daughter's former schools have tortoises, and the local utility office (which I visit occasionally for work) has a tortoise enclosure. So I'm acquainted with a lot of tortoises.

I went for a morning hike at Red Rock.

But despite having lived in Las Vegas my entire life (40 years now), I have never seen a wild tortoise.

Or at least, not until a couple weekends ago.

A couple Sundays ago, my partner and I went with one of her colleagues on a morning nature hike at Red Rock canyon. Several times during the hike, I had joked that I wanted all the tortoises to come to me so that I can give them butt scratches. Pet desert tortoises often enjoy having the seam between the back of their shell and the skirt scratched. They'll often lean into and shake their butt back and forth as you run your finger nails along the seam. Obviously, I wasn't serious about giving scratches to the wild tortoises, as I know they are a Threatened Species, and touching them or interfering with them in their natural habitat is against the law.

Anyway, as we were finishing up the looping trail, approaching the parking lot, I mentioned that I was disappointed that I didn't get to give any butt scratches to any tortoises. Ironically, just as I had finished saying that, a juvenile tortoise climbed out from a ditch next to the hiking trail and approached us. So we stopped to take a look and admire the adorable little fella (without touching him, of course). They looked to be a healthy tortoise, maybe 8 or 10 years old, with a nice round shell. They were also surprisingly clean. I'm used to tortoises in captivity always being more of a muted gray color due to being covered in dust from their enclosures. But this little fella was a dark brown color.

The tortoise also seemed to like me, and sort of followed me around as I moved around them. Maybe the tortoise somehow sensed my fondness for tortoises?

I saw my first wild desert tortoise during this Red Rock hike, and it seemed to like me!

Earlier today, football gaming fans got some bad (but not un-expected) news. Take Two has apparently canceled its proposed new NFL 2k video game. There wasn't any kind of press release or public announcement (that I saw). Instead, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick broke the news in an interview with Game File. The full interview is behind a pay-wall, so I wasn't able to read the entire thing. So I was reliant on other media outlets, such as Insider Gaming, to summarize the interview.

Take Two had obtained the rights to make an NFL game back in 2020. The kicker was that EA still held an NFL-mandated exclusivity on "simulation" NFL games, which meant that anything 2k would develop or publish would have to be some kind of "non-simulation" (i.e. "arcade") game.

However, the little shreds of news that we got about this game over the years indicated that it was in development hell, and may have been completely restarted multiple times. Now, Zelnick has confirmed that the designs that Take Two was experimenting with simply "weren't working out creatively". Take Two couldn't simply make an NFL 2k game like they used to back in the early 2000's, since that would qualify as a "simulation" game. This apparently left them struggling to try to find an alternative identity for their game. Would it be something like NFL Street? NFL Blitz? Legend Bowl? Or maybe ... ugh ... their own variation of Ultimate Team, but without a Franchise Mode to go along with it in order to appeal to sim gamers like me? Well, apparently, none of those ideas really panned out, and the designers were unable to come up with any ideas or prototypes that the executives felt would appeal to a wide enough market to justify the costs of the NFL license and development.

The only product that came out of the deal was a mobile card-collecting game called NFL 2k Playmakers, which went out-of-support after only a year on the market.

NFL 2k Playmakers was a mobile card-collecting game that was shut down after only a year.

You may have already read my review of NFL Gameday (the board game; not the old PlayStation video game). While I was looking up information about that game, I stumbled upon another, slightly older, football board game called 1st & Goal. This was an un-licensed football board game from a small publisher of family-friendly games. It looked incredibly similar to NFL Gameday, except that it seemed to involve more detailed football strategy and actual dice that added randomness to the final outcome of plays.

This looked like a huge upgrade over NFL Gameday's over-simplistic, rock-paper-scissors strategy. I went online trying to find out where I can buy this game, but I didn't find it listed for sale anywhere. It wasn't listed as being in-stock at my local board games' websites, and I had never seen it on the shelves at any of those stores. Believe me, if I had seen a football board game, I would have noticed! It was out of stock on Amazon (but has apparently since come back in stock!), and it wasn't available from any of the online retailers that I commonly buy board games from.

But one online retailer had a 2nd-hand game shop that listed 1 copy in "near mint" condition. So I gambled and bought it. Thankfully, it showed up in great shape, with all the components! In fact, it even included some expansion content that I didn't have to pay for. So I got a bargain!

I was imagining making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

Upon receiving the game and flipping through the rulebook, my first reaction was "where has this game been all my life?!" Seriously, how did this game exist for 15 years without me hearing about it? One of the reasons that I bought NFL Gameday was that I had actually been mulling the idea for Kickstarting a football board game in my head that would have worked very similar. However, NFL Gameday was actually a much simpler version of what I had envisioned. But when I saw 1st & Goal, it was almost exactly what I had imagined for my own football board game.

So, hooray! My dream football board game already exists, and I can play it!

But also, boo! Somebody else beat me to it...

But, I do have some nitpicks with this game, so maybe there's room for me to come up with some revisions and improvements. And given how hard this game was to find, and that very few people seem to know it exists, there might be plenty of room for a competing board game. So maybe I should start that Kickstarter after all...

© Amazon/MGM

Project Hail Mary

As frequent readers probably know, I'm a fan of hard science fiction. I'll try to make a point of seeing new, high-concept sci-fi movies in theaters, especially if they are receiving positive word of mouth. Two of my favorite movies of the past decade or so have been The Martian and Arrival. Project Hail Mary is almost like a combination of those 2 movies, and its based on a book by the same author who rote the novel of The Martian, so it should be right up my alley.

I did still like it. But I also found myself disappointed that it was so "cutesy" and not quite as smart or thoughtful as I had hoped it would be.

Yeah, the rock alien is adorable. And the practical effects looked exceptional. The scenes of Grace and Rocky learning to communicate with each other, explaining concepts that are common to them, but alien to the other, and then solving problems together are the highlight of the movie to me.

And hey! Rocky is from 40 Eridani, which is the same star that Star Trek's Vulcan is supposed to orbit. So that was a fun little Easter Egg! Rocky is a Vulcan. He's a "Rock Spock"!

But Rocky is also a symbol of much of what annoyed me. For every moment in which the two are having slow, thoughtful conversations about the nature of existence, there is also a scene of Rocky running around like an excitable puppy for strictly comedic purposes. It just seems off for a character who is supposed to be a highly-intelligent engineer on an interstellar mission to save his species from extinction.

More generally speaking, this movie leans heavily on the trope of an in-experienced "regular guy" having to bumble his way through an incredibly technically-demanding mission. Yes, the guy is a PhD, so he is a very smart person. This doesn't quite fall into "Mary Sue" territory. But he's a biologist. He's not an engineer, or a pilot, or an astronaut. Yes, he does have months (or longer) to learn the spaceship's functions, but it's still not entirely believable that he would be able to single-handedly figure out how to operate a complicated spaceship. This is what separates Project Hail Mary from the much better movies of The Martian and Arrival. The characters in those movies are experts solving problems within their field of expertise and experience. They aren't middle school teachers thrown into a spaceship with no training at all.

©Amazon/MGM

Grace has to single-handedly figure out how to operate an advanced, experimental spaceship.