Happy Thanksgolfing 2023!

Hello fine readers and Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! To those that don't, might I suggest celebrating the alternate holiday of Thanksgolfing? The family and I have been celebrating both actually.

I recently purchased Walkabout Minigolf VR on Oculus, and my youngest and I have been casting our gameplay on to the family TV in the living room. Watching each other mini-golf on the larger screen has actually been pretty great. There's been a lot of taunting, a lot of cheering, and so much hilarious frustration when those missed putts treat us wrong.

The practice course in Walkabout Minigolf VR

I love this VR game. I can't believe it took me this long to buy the game that, to be honest, should be one of the first any person with a new VR headset should purchase. It's a great starter game in VR. It's optimized well with bright, fun colors and supports multiplayer.

Lots of courses to choose from with plenty of DLC courses

Each course comes in two flavors: Easy and Hard. AND, it's not just mini-golf. Within each course is a little game of "find the hidden lost ball," which has you teleporting all over the course looking in the pixelated corners to find all kinds of multicolored balls to use when you play. 

Hitting that perfect shot -- I actually got a hole in one right here!

To unlock Hard mode all you have to do is score under par in Easy mode or find a certain amount of hidden lost balls.  Hard mode features a hidden quest in each world. If you finish the quest, you'll unlock a new putter to play with.

With some time off of work, it's been the perfect way to relax and have fun with the family. 

Looking forward to the new Meow Wolf themed course coming out soon!

Our putting around virtually made us crave some putting around in the real world, and so Uber Wife, my youngest, and I went to our local indoor minigolf course to play a round. 

Took a few fun 360 shots at the course while we were there

I have to say that it was great to see how putting in VR actually improved my son's putting in the real world. Typically he just hits that ball way to hard and in the past often ended up hitting the stroke limit for a hole. This time around, he was right there with us and played well.

Is it Halloween or Thanksgolfing?!

To round things out, I saw a PC game I had wishlisted was available with a discount to purchase (as is the Black Friday way with Steam), so I sprung for it.  I mean, it is Thanksgolfing after all, and there's nothing quite like a good game of Dungeon Golf.

In Dungeon Golf, you mini-put through a wild, trap and monster filled set of dungeon-themed courses as a variety of dungeon dwellers. The comedy value is high on this one as there are two Dungeon Golf sports casters talking about how you're doing throughout. 

A minotaur who yells fore

So far I've only played through course 1 in the single player Golf Quest mode, but I imagine the game is so much more fun in multiplayer mode. In Golf Quest mode you putt around the dungeon while taking on each dungeon course's quest objective. This could be defeat all enemies, open all treasure chests, get to the hole as fast as possible, etc. Getting too close to a monster without hitting it will result in a penalty stroke, so it ends up being a fun puzzle to figure out the best way around the course.

Breaking pots and opening chests in Dungeon Golf will provide you with mana that can power your spells. There are nine different characters you can play as an each has a different spell and special ability that you can cast when you have enough mana. Some characters seem more suited to play in multiplayer than others, but that doesn't stop the game from being fun to just putt around.

I love playing with this kooky steed riding a steed

Do you have a favorite golf game you plan to play on Thanksgolfing today after your regular Turkey Day festivities?  Let's hear about it in the comments. Now that I think about it, man I'd love to break out some Mario Golf Super Rush with the family on the Switch today as well. 

Thanksgolfing is the best!

Happy Dueling!

An Adventure at Meow Wolf in Grapevine Texas

All the Summer fun is quickly ending around our house. The kids are back to school next week. That means the Uber Wife goes back to school next week as well (she's an Educational Assistant for special needs kids). Because of this and since my birthday fell nicely near the weekend, we decided to take the 3 hour there and 3 hour back road trip over to a little suburb of Dallas, Texas, known as Grapevine. What's in Grapevine? Meow Wolf! What's Meow Wolf? Let me break it down.

Meow Wolf at a high level is an interactive art exhibit that's basically an expensive Fun House for adults. From the history that I've been told (my oldest is super into this), the first Meow Wolf was in Sante Fe New Mexico, and was really just an experiment to see if this idea could be profitable. The answer was yes, which led to probably the most famous of the Meow Wolf locations, Omega Mart in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The next Meow Wolf location to open up was Convergence Station in Denver, Colorado. This is one my wife and youngest had a chance to visit earlier in the summer when they took a trip to visit her side of the family. A little less than a month ago, the fourth Meow Wolf location opened up in Grapevine, Texas. The experience is titled "The Real Unreal."  

Welcome to the Real Unreal!

The Real Unreal exhibit begins in a house, which very much seems at first like any other house when you enter, but around the rooms you begin to find story clues as to where we find the family that lives there.  So here's the story as much as I could figure out:

Figuring out clues to Jared's disappearance

The boy of the family, Jared, had been missing for three days and the family went in a panic to find him. Jared, as it turns out, had a little not-so-imaginary friend named Happy Gary, a very colorful and crazy axolotl-type-of-whimsical-creature. Jared followed Happy Gary into the Real Unreal for only a short time, but time in the Real Unreal works differently. Upon Jared's return, the whole family got sucked into the Real Unreal because Happy Gary broke something, and now the entire house was serving as a portal into the Real Unreal realm. (um, something like that)

I may be totally wrong on a few things and there seems to be lots of mysterious questions. We ran into a really nice 17-year-old there who took a liking to our nerdy family and kept running into us and talking with us about all the clues and things he had found. He was REALLY into the story. 

I took my 360 camera with me, and unfortunately they didn't allow selfie sticks, so most of my 360 shots also feature my stretched arm and hand holding up the camera, which to be honest, kind of helps sell the vibe of Meow Wolf anyway.

So depending on which portal you take out of the house, you'll end up in different areas of the maze-like exhibit. Eventually the paths kind of converge into a crazy City Street full of neon and wild art. There's a phone booth there with numbers you can call and get random messages about what's happening in the city, like the number we called to find out that every second Tuesday of the month there may or may not be some kind of worm club gathering?

360 photo of a crowded city street ally -- open it up and look around!

Inside the City there's a very chill dance club that plays some really mellow electronic music as the whole black lit and neon filled room undulates to the beat. It was pretty great. We spent a lot of time in this spot, just hanging out and enjoying our time people watching. For an extra 5 bucks a person they'll give you some 3D glasses you can wear, and really the best time to wear these was in this dance club. The colors just gave the walls a new "Real unreal" depth to it.

The undulating dance club of the Real Unreal

There was also a really scuffed up looking arcade here with actual, playable homegrown video games for the exhibit. It was really hard to get some screen time in front of one of the games since there were so many people there, so I let my kids do all the playing while the wife and I sat down on a sofa made from a stitched together pile of clothes.

360 photo of the arcade

Of course, this place also lends itself to Instagram photo opportunities throughout. It definitely has a different vibe than a dedicated photo op installation, but with great spots like the black and white illusion tunnel, it just makes sense: this is a great spot for getting unusual photos and videos.

360 photo of the illusion hallway

It was a long and fun day, and the family had a good time exploring. It might be fun to actually try to come back at a less crowded time than the end of summer on a weekend of the opening month. In fact, a second tuesday of the month, a few months down the road, during the middle of the school year sounds perfect! I'd love to see if there actually was some kind of special worm thing happening at that time. I'm sure Happy Gary would be excited to see us again.

Happy Dueling!

29th Anniversary -- Natural Bridge Caverns Trip

Hey all! Dropping a quick "real life" post today to say that yesterday was my wife's and my 29th anniversary of being married!  To celebrate we decided to take a trip down to Canyon Lake, Texas. It was actually pretty surprising how wonderful and peaceful it was there. I don't know if it was considered off season in the middle of September, but it was pretty uncrowded and only a few boats were cruising around the lake. Bliss.

We didn't actually get in the lake while we were there, but we had a lot of serene moments just hiking around, throwing rocks in the water, and watching the water ripple toward us. 

While we were there we took a 30-minute detour to visit a wonderful location called the Natural Bridge Caverns. This was actually a very impressive cave tour that took us 18 stories underground. Hiking down wasn't too big of a deal, but climbing back up was quite the work out.

This was again a fantastic time for me to break out the 360 camera.  Check out these impressive Cavern Rooms we toured!

 

   

 

Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery life about half way through the tour. I would have liked to have snagged a 360 picture of the final hike up a cavern room that was truly impressive. I could have easily seen a D&D setting here where a roper or two ambushed the party.

I could see us heading back to this spot for a weekend getaway again in the future. If you're in Texas and looking for some bliss, this type of trip might just be the thing you need.

Happy Dueling!

Some Lessons Learned Blaugust 2022

According to the Master Schedule over on Belghast's blog, this week is to be the Lessons Learned week after a solid month of blogging. So, hmmm, what did I learn? Lemme brainstorm that a bit:

• I learned that you can't view 360 photos hosted from the Momento360 website on your Quest 2. I even e-mailed their support about it. They pointed the finger at a change to how the Quest 2 works and said they wouldn't have a fix for at least a year.

Looking out over Lonely Lake Georgetown

• I learned that my old Runes of Magic guildmates probably aren't interested in reading my blog anymore now that I'm not writing about RoM and logging on daily. LOL! It's fine. I get it. Same thing happened with my old Project Gorgon guildmates.
  
  
• I learned that I can't hack doing Blaugust and Mutant Reviewers at the same time. I didn't get any movie reviews done this month. I suck.
  
  
• I learned that I think I'm finally getting my Sea Legs in VR. Vection sickness is no joke and there are games that handle it well, and there are games that handle it poorly, but over time, the more you play, the more you start to get an immunity built up to it.
  
  
• I learned that along with gaining an immunity to vection sickness, the more you play VR, the more the illusion of a fantasy world around you starts to crumble away. I'll never forget how I felt playing Astrobot for the first time and how marvelous that fantasy world was in the midst of an apocalyptic pandemic. I don't know if I get that deep into the illusion of a VR world anymore.

Do I have to climb that tower? It might make me seasick.

• I learned the impact that Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact had on the gaming world. I feel like I missed out on riding a really important cultural gaming phenomenon by not exploring those games more (although my kids played the heck out of it). Tower of Fantasy . . . I'm looking at you!

Feeling the Impact of Genshin Impact

• I learned that looking back on your game portfolio can get a little tedious and dredge up some old buried feelings. I mean, it'll help me if I ever need to start looking for a new job somewhere, but probably not the best material for a Blaugust.
  
  
• I learned that if you happened to make it through that whole list and read to this point, that I appreciate you. Not a lot of people are willing to read a long list like this and invest time in what you have to write, especially when you're a niche game blogger. Thank you!

I'm sure there's more I learned, but I've gotta get ready for the day. So many things to explore and never enough time.

Happy Dueling!

About Me 2022

I haven't really written an about me on my blog since 2010, so in the spirit of the Introduce Yourself Week for Blaugust, I thought I'd lay it all out, again. So, lemme catch you up with the past 12 years!

Hi. TLDR: I'm Tom. I live in a suburb of Austin, TX, but I'm originally from Utah. After working for a contractor for the Air Force for 14 years as a Technical Editor, I moved to Austin to be in the video game industry. I've been writing ever since I could keep a journal, and I've been writing about games for years. It just comes naturally to me.

~~

Now for the nitty-gritty. My parents were pro-journaling. I have journals dating back when I was writing about jumping in piles of snow in my front yard and my cousin stepping on my toys and breaking them. One Christmas as a kid I asked for a typewriter, and my parents delivered!  It was a cheap plastic thing, but it was a legit typewriter. I loved that thing. Yes, I was a weird kid, and I like to think I was also destined to love to write.

360 photo of my old neighborhood in Brigham City

Eventually in my late high school years I took up songwriting and poetry and started down a lyrical path with my music. In my college years, I sensed that wasn't going to work as a career for me, and I opted to major in Communication with a minor in Technical Writing and took up a job as a Technical Editor to start and support a family, which it did for 14 years.

360 photo of our old neighborhood where my wife and I started our family

As it turns out, writing about video games was pretty natural to me. I was blogging as well, but it was a personal blog that was mostly about my kids and music (I've since hid that stuff from public view. It's not really worth reading anymore). Most of my writing about video games up until 2008 was done over e-mail or on guild forums. Typically I'd just write about my thoughts, wants, and goals for my Cleric and Beastlord characters on Everquest.

My Beastlord was named "Stingite" because he was an Iksar from a land where scorpions roamed in the newbie zone, and I had this little OC backstory about my mother naming my beastlord "Stingite" because she would feed him scorpion tails.  I know.  It's kind of dumb, but the handle stuck and I'm still naming myself Stingite in video games all these years later.

In 2008, I fell in love with a new game called Wizard101, and the words just started pouring out of me. I took up the mantle of blogger and started writing about the game and how I was playing it with my family. Wizard101 liked what I was writing and made me an official fan site and their featured blogger. 

This actually led to writing about Wizard101 for Beckett's Massive Online Gamer Magazine and Beckett's Fun Online Games Magazine. Kind of cool actually being paid to write for a magazine. That used to mean something, and I was incredibly proud of seeing my byline in those magazines.

During this timeframe I started to realize how cool the video game industry was while trading emails with Kiersten Samwell, Fred Howard, Nelson Everheart, and other people that worked at or with KingsIsle. It put a bug in me, and I applied for three different jobs at KingsIsle over the period of a couple years. It never worked out. Either the job didn't pay enough to support my family of five (wife and I with 3 kids) or I was always their second choice for the position. I figured three strikes and you're out, KingsIsle, and never applied for a job there again.

Then one day in 2012 I got a phone call from Fred Howard. He wanted me to play the alpha of Pirate101, which was an exclusive honor at the time.  No more than a handful of outside people even got to play in the Alpha of Pirate101, so it felt pretty great.  After a week of playing, he called me back and offered me a job as the Community Manager for Pirate101, no interview needed.  I was floored.

So after working it out with my family and working out salary with KingsIsle, I took the job . . . and the pay cut . . . to work in the video game industry. Living the dream! I spent six and a half years in Community Management / Public Relations / Social Media / Marketing / Management and then made the jump over to Game Design. 

Old designing buddies at KingsIsle

I've now been in Design for four years: at first working as a level designer, then transitioning to more formal game design and narrative design. The past year I've been working as a Senior Designer working with outsourcing groups at WIMO Games.

I have other loves of course, outside of games, and this is mostly a history of my life through the lens of video game writing, but since this is a game blog first and foremost, I'll talk mostly about games here.  If you'd like to hear about my forays into music, well, you could head on over to my music blog or my bandcamp page. For my personal life, I usually stick to Facebook or Twitter, but I'm typically a pretty private person. Suffice to say, I am a church-goer and feel like I've been led and guided to where I am today.

Thanks for reading the Friendly Necromancer!

Blaugust 2022 is upon us! I'm all in!

 . . . and as the great soothsayers have foretold, the time is finally upon us: Blaugustpocolypse! 

That's right, friends, fans, and fellow bloggers, the time has finally come to write a post a day for 31 days as a part of Belghast's annual blog-fest for NERDS like us. I've been thinking about this one a lot in advance for some reason -- I even prepped a list of possible topics! That's right, I take this blogging business seriously! I mean, at least during August.

As it turns out, my mind is still firmly on . . . work! So to those ends, I want to use Blaugust to write out a few things that could end up on a Game Designer portfolio site of sorts. I'll be refreshing my "About Me," which is woefully out of date currently, and I'll be writing a little bit about each of the games I've worked on the past 10 years.

Also, I have a solid Blaugust's worth of VR games in my steam library that I haven't played yet, so I'm hoping to play and discuss those with you all as well as talk about a few old favorites like Wizard101 and Pirate101. 

My hobbies have expanded a bit this past year, and I have a new 360 camera that I've been loving! It's something I can't wait to share with you all, so here's your first sneak peek.

Spin that picture left to right and up and down (and zoom in and out) to get a fun view of my friend's record shop from my recent trip to Utah. Or, if you're really up for the full VR experience, throw on your headset and take a look at it in full VR. Adam was in the process of setting up his new, closet-sized record shop inside a coffee joint, and I was left alone to guard it and catalog it. 360 photos of tight spaces that are chock full of interesting things to look at are fun!

So here we go! It's great to be participating in Blaugust again, and I hope you enjoy coming back daily.

Happy Dueling