Weeknotes 245

The nights have begun suddenly and obviously to draw in. It’s cool and crisp and sunny. As I apparently insist upon saying every flipping year, autumn’s here and I love it. 🍂

I caught a cold. Other than a bit of sneezing and sniffling it hasn’t been too bad, although I did have to cancel some social plans for fear of spreading it around.

Not much happened this week. Work has been very busy and I’m tired. It probably — i.e. definitely — doesn’t help that I decided to start writing project weeknotes. “As well as ruining your Sundays, now you can ruin your Fridays too”, said a teammate. Accurate.

SONY CORNER: I played a lot more Astro Bot. No spoilers, but: there’s a ridiculous amount of unexpected fun stuff in this game. I’m enjoying it so much that I’m already worried about feeling mildly bereft when I finish it.

The PlayStation 5 Pro was announced and I’m not sure why. At the moment I can’t imagine spending £700 on something that’s only marginally better than what I’ve already got, especially with no sign of any new platform exclusives.

It’s possible that a game will come out in the next year or two that’ll tempt me to upgrade mid-cycle, although given how much of a waste of time GTA V was, I’ll almost certainly not bother with GTA VI whenever it does eventually arrive.

I’d love to know what Naughty Dog are working on.

It always amazes me how bad Sony’s editorial approach to the PlayStation Store is. The listings are paginated grids of endless squares, totally dominated by bargain-bin DLC instead of actual games you might want to buy, and then the game pages themselves are so devoid of relevant information that it’s very difficult to know what you’re buying and whether it’s any good. How can they get away with it being so half-arsed? Aren’t there entire disciplines dedicated to making these things dangerously compelling?

SUNNY CORNER: I watched episode three of Sunny and found it so boring and confusing that I nearly gave up before the end. I’m out.

I watched the (presumably) final episode of Double Fine PsychOdyssey. It was a cosy treat to be able to revisit its familiar faces, places and feelings one last time, and I appreciated the chance to see what had happened in the intervening years. It couldn’t quite dispel the bleak undercurrent of real people enduring real suffering for the sake of a mediocre game but it was still reassuring to see that they mostly came out the other side okay.

It did confirm my suspicion that I don’t want to work remotely again, so that’s useful.

I’m relieved to see Prism become the default CRuby parser at last. Hopefully one step closer to defusing the unnecessary ticking time bomb of having two competing parser projects. ♻️

This is surely the best twenty seconds of video ever to be broadcast on Cracking The Cryptic.