Games

7 January 2025

From the Chronicles of Dawnmaster Aeneas, The Morninglord’s Chosen

SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, and in particular The Dark Urge origin! Proceed to read at your own peril! Written in the Year of Three Ships Sailing, 1492 DR, the following are extracts from the Chronicles of Dawnmaster Aeneas, a Bhaalspawn who was at the center of the events of the Mindflayer invasion. Together with a group of similarly lost souls, he was instrumental in the defeat of the Elder Brain that threatened to destroy Baldur’s Gate and most of the Sword Coast. Having woken up without recollection of who he was, he […]

8 August 2023

Raiders of the Serpent Sea Character Sheet (A5)

I will be starting to play in a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign soon(ish), and one of the things I always wanted to improve about my own DnD experience was the character sheet. The basic DnD one is too unflexible for me, and even though I really always wanted to re-make it in InDesign, I never had the patience for it during past campaigns. The last campaign that I played, which was Ancient Greek-themed, actually came with a gorgeously beautiful themed character sheet – Odyssey of the Dragonlords. That one I did import to InDesign, and filled it out in […]

10 May 2023

The Castle in the Sky

The topic of job search kept me occupied for several months now. During this whole process I often thought about which jobs would be a great fit for me other than those to which I usually applied. In particular, while I was in Berlin two weeks ago for an internship that is about to end, I visited a small board gaming club, and inspired by that, an outrageous idea started brewing inside of me. It made me think about what I would do with my life if I had unlimited funds and wouldn’t need to worry about my career. Actually […]

20 April 2023

The many layers of Arthur Morgan

I would like to express a massive SPOILER WARNING for this entire post. If you ever plan to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and would like to not have your enjoyment of it ruined, I urge you to NOT continue reading! Just to put things into context, I would like to point out that I have not played Red Dead Redemption (1), and I only familiarized myself with the story of this game after I played Red Dead Redemption 2. If you know all the games, you will know that knowing certain things will change your perception of certain characters […]

16 February 2023

The World of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West

About a year and a half ago, I first discovered the world of Horizon in the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn. I was absolutely enamored with this world. It’s so strange and primordial, yet it’s so familiar that it makes you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Horizon is the world about 1000 years into the future, in which an apocalypse has caused humanity to be reverted to tribes of hunter-gatherers. And discovering that world was an absolutely fascinating experience, which went hand in hand with the story of this game. In this game, you play as Aloy, […]

9 February 2023

Unpopular Opinion: Harry Potter is not that great

Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion. As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book […]

6 February 2023

Experiencing nausea when gaming

Last week I wrote about my issues in gaming with dark mode, which seems to be the standard for video games. In this post, I would like to address another issue that stops me from playing a lot of games: dealing with nausea with gaming due to first person perspective, enclosed spaces, camera shake and related issues. Some time in the past 10 years, I have lost my ability to play first person perspective video games. While I was still able to play Skyrim in early 2012 without any issues (on the XBOX), I have since not been able to […]

31 January 2023

Dark mode as a commonly overlooked user experience issue in gaming

I’ve been a video gamer for over 20 years, starting out with classics such as Diablo I, Diablo II, Grim Fandango and Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. While I did not always game as much, I’ve been getting back into gaming for the past couple of years with games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Valheim, Wasteland 3, etc. However, I noticed that I’m not as young as I used to be. 20 years ago, I didn’t really have issues playing video games, but these days, the number of games that I can actually play has become […]

3 October 2022

Read Dead Redemption 2

Rarely have a been carried away by a video game as I have been by Red Dead Redemption 2. What an absolutely amazing, outstanding, and somewhat heartbreaking game. Admittedly, Arthur and I had a rough start, I really hated Chapter 1 because learning the controls in this game (and learning to not accidentally shoot people) takes way too long. But once that was over and the story truly began, the game really grew on me, and I enjoyed just riding around this breathtaking, pristine landscape, back when times were simpler and the world was not quite insane yet. Just Arthur […]