G = Gif.
I = Isle.
V = Verschärfung.
The pronunciation of Why varies by dialect.
Alternatively:
F = Forlorn
V = Verloren
But Verloren isn’t really an English word.
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The only one that jumps to mind for me is I as in Aim.
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I used to work with someone who always used “Q as in quixotic” over the phone. Which would always make me laugh a little, with quixotic having its roots in Don Quixote, and the very different pronunciation it could have.
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Found Firewatch in my stash of unplayed & barely played steam games. Pretty good. Though I kept trying to navigate with the map up. The game tries to make sure that you don’t-- since Drop down and climb are disabled.
Anyway, I’m trying to tack down a radio signal and my radio rings. Got to put down my map, answer the radio and sound tender and understanding-- all with a time limit… Augh! If there was a “romance plot”, I totally screwed that up. Or maybe it means I’m not a cad?
(yeah, my manual dexterity is not what it should be.)
subnautica below zero on an m1 mac. They only have a week to kill this bug before it’s out of early access.
(this is a still, in reality, the blocks of solid color flash)
A solution lies in using the unstable beta release.
I just finished my first game (“The Demise of a Teetotaller”) of this, played over the phone with a friend from Sydney over a couple of nights:
Much fun.
We solved the main mystery, but totally missed the secondary one and took three times as many clues as Holmes did. Which, apparently, is a fairly successful result; we were careful not to be too profligate in the number of leads we chased.
It works well over the phone (I was sending SMS photos of the visual clues and the bits too long to just read out); it would also work as a pure text game, played slowly by email etc.
But it’d be at its best with a group of friends in a comfy room with some wine and nibbles. Playable as a solo game, but much better with two people; probably better still with a larger group, but large groups are not necessary.
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Interesting… I’m going to have to take a look at these. They sound a bit like a trimmed-down version of the Mysterious Package Company’s “Post Mortem LA” series, which I’ve played through with friends and can be very interesting if everyone’s in the right mood and doesn’t mind a fair bit of reading out loud:
The Post Mortem games have the map, directory, and newspaper mechanic, but also a series of physical “evidence” that you get to open and look at when you come across them in the story. It also looked like they have a bit more of a choose-your-own-adventure feel, as the leads you investigate can force you to go to other places, or require a choice or already knowing some specific clue.
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BTW: the text entries for the leads in Sherlock range from a single sentence to a bit more than a page, with most being a few paragraphs. Dramatic reading can be fun, but isn’t necessary; it still works if everyone just spends a minute reading it silently (often interrupted by an entertaining “oh, Jones is a…” “hang on, I’m not up to that bit yet…oooh, I see what you mean…” etc).
Because the game tends to be “examine one lead, then spend half an hour discussing the implications and which lead to follow next”, there actually isn’t that much of the total time devoted to reading the book. In the first mystery, we examined about fifteen leads (about half of which were quite short) before calling out our suspect. There was perhaps ten minutes of reading in a four hour long game.
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Ah, thanks for that. That’s the feel I got from the brief look I took at the free one they have available, but it’s good to confirm it. The Post Mortem ones are much more like a short novel, rather than blurbs like that.
I can see the short leads working better in some groups or with less time available, so I think I’m definitely going to check these out too. 
Working through the second mystery (“A Twisted Trail”) now.
About four hours (over several nights) and twenty clues in; got most of it figured out, but there are still a few key facts to sort out.
Still good fun.
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Control is currently free on the Epic Game Store. It’s a pretty great action adventure.
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So the only roleplaying games at the local book store seem to be Pathfinder 1, Pathfinder 2, Starfinder, Dungeons and Dragons 5E, and a couple others. I’m not fond of the system, but, to be fair, I’ve only had the chance to play mid-level campaigns with much more experienced players. And I have a lot of adventures for the system or its precursors.
Has anyone here played the Essentials Kit? Or the Starter Set, or the Beginners box?
Has anyone tried variants, such as Epic 6, which reduce the level range and use lower-level rules for higher-level adventures?
I’ve mostly planned to convert everything to either Savage Pathfinder for moderate crunch or Tiny Dungeons for minimal crunch, but I’m wondering if low-level DnD would work just as well. In any case, I’d need to find disability rules, I’ve seen some for Pathfinder but don’t know how well they work, or how well they’d fit into the DnD Essentials Kit. In particular, some of these variants grant an extra feat, while the DnD 5E basic rules don’t use feats.
P.S. Looking it over, Pathfinder shows challenge ratings which may help convert extra combat encounters into other types, while both 5E and Savage Pathfinder omit them.
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The Kerbal team have announced that they’re halting further development and have released the final [1] ultimate edition of KSP1:
.
[1] Well, almost. There was one planned feature (ground anchors) that they decided to withhold for a few weeks to chase down a couple of final bugs.
I’ve just discovered that if you have the optional difficulty toggle “Kerbals affected by g-forces” switched on, the game starts offering “thrillseeker” tourist contracts.
Basically, it’s “launch a plane or ship with a civilian Kerbal onboard and make them pass out”.
You could do it with just a ridiculously overpowered rocket launch, but I’m having more fun building airplanes with a probe-core autopilot and doing high-g aerobatics until everyone aboard is happily unconscious. 
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Just finished the third Sherlock mystery.
This time, we got most of the secondary mystery but made a complete hash of the primary. And took four times as many clues as Sherlock did.
Still fun.
—
I’ve also recently bought a copy of the Arkham Horror card game; saving that for when a friend comes to visit in Spring.
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I shan’t miss the treadmill of trying to figure out what mods have or haven’t been updated, or which ones have been rendered unnecessary by an update.
Now I just need to get back into the game. I got sidetracked by trying to figure out a way to simi-automate a mission log… I used to keep one in a tiddlywiki, but browser changes broke my process, and it was a pain trying to manually note things like the vehicle build and the resulting science and currency results. Got as far as a script that can fully parse the vehicle and save file format, but…
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Took another try at playing Blood Bowl.
My first try was a couple years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, and failed miserably. Decided to come back to it when I had time to actually learn it. This time, I played one half of a game still not knowing what I was doing (and the opposition got a touchdown on me). Then saved and went to read the manuals and tried again the next day.
Second half, I was easily able to run a play up the side and get a touchdown, despite their star player tagging along just behind my runner.
Then it went weird and fun. They picked up the ball and moved some catchers down to receive, which I was able to cover while also sending blockers towards their thrower and his escorts. Then right at the halfway mark, on the far edge of the field, everyone took turns falling down and dropping the ball until the timer ran out. By the end half of both our teams were just lying knocked down on the field. And the ball had just been bouncing around between my fumbles and his.
I could see this being a fun game. And even not knowing what I was doing half the time, I was able to get a draw, with some fun moments.
The whole ‘running out the clock’ thing is not even something I’d thought of as a strategy, but there it is.
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Now starting the fourth.
One thing I particularly enjoy about the writing is the way in which it sequentially builds and subverts expectations.
If you finish one case thinking “we should always do x, y and z”, then it is almost guaranteed that, in the next case, x/y/z will no longer be effective. The game actively tries to trick you into thinking that you’re starting to outsmart it, just so it can then rub your face in the fact that you haven’t.
But in a fun, not-too-infuriating sorta way.
Just finished The Last of Us 2… I’m impressed, if a little exhausted by the constant scrounging for junk. Well told and well made.
I avoided basically everything to do with the game for the last year as I knew I’d get to playing it eventually, so I missed the ‘controversy’ around it, but I’m going to guess it was 99% your common or garden gamer sexism/homophobia/transphobia.
Stopping reading gaming sites a few years back was an excellent decision 
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If you’re interested in a different take on it, I can recommend this podcast:
Disclaimer: I have not played the game, or its predecessor. I generally find the people at Waypoint to be thoughtful in their approach to games criticism, whether I agree with them or not.
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