I tried very hard to make our life all about the new baby, and to that end, I even arranged a date night for New Year’s Eve. We went out to Sulani’s only restaurant, and Mom came over to watch the kids. We had a lovely meal, and I even got to surprise Kado with a kiss under the Mistletoe they still had up in the lobby.

I cannot even begin to tell you how many hours my family has lost to this game. Now, let me follow that up to say that none of us – me, hubby, or son – have every FINISHED the game. It’s that hard. However, it’s also super easy. At it’s heart, this is a match-3 game much like Bejeweled (which I probably should have included in this list, too…) .. but that’s about where the similarity stops. There are SO MANY facets to this game. Taming creatures, learning spells, fighting monsters, training your mount, forging new weapons, building your castle, leveling your character, and, above all, participating in an immensely engrossing story. And – even though most of those things involve doing match-3 puzzles, they all feel different enough – and challenging enough – that once this game gets into your head, it’s hard to put down again.

Since I didn’t quite finish the time I planned to spend in Medieval Dynasty, we’ll do some finishing up for that – next week will start the Megaquarium week (which will involve a ton of fun mods to add a whole bunch of new fishies to my game!) Another highlight of the week will be some Sims building, working on both of my big builds that are due this month. Also, I will be publishing my next shell challenge, the “Platform Problem” – which should be a LOT of fun – on June 1st. (And you still have time to do the Gimme Shelter build, too!)

Also, I re-posted this one, to fix the first photo….

In all likelihood, this is a game franchise you’ve never heard of. However, it’s also one that took countless hours of time from my son and I on our Playstation 1. Initially, I put it on this game list for that reason alone- it clearly defines a large period of time that I spend playing games… but ultimately, I decided not to play it on stream. I truly couldn’t see it being a fun game for someone else to watch you play, at least – not for any full stream. Hence, I decided I’d write an article about it and leave it on the list, but not play it.

Afterthoughts: I really had a good time playing Civ 5 on stream. I just started a random civ game, and ended up doing a cultural victory. Took me two days, but we did win the game. Unfortunately, due to copyright music, I can’t post the VODs for it on youtube, which annoys me to no […]

Chapter 11 | Chapter 13 The evening “dawned” slowly, with as keyed up as I was for tonight… and I woke up, took my shower, took care of my garden, and prepared for my “day” as best as I could. Sighing, I found a human wandering around the town square looking very lost, and… steeling […]

I really have enjoyed this whole game series, and bringing it on-stream was no different. If you’re into 4X strategy games, this is one that’s high on my list of recommended purchases. If nothing else, get it for the history that they’ve worked so hard to include in the game. The graphics aren’t too bad, either, and the user interface makes the game easy to learn (or pick up again after years of not playing an “Age” game)… So, yeah. Would I give the game a positive review? Heck yeah, and playing it on stream didn’t change my mind.

We quickly settled into a new daily routine, this little family of mine. Charlie excelled at both school and scouts, and seemed to be the most at home when making friends and being as active as possible. I wondered what that would mean for her future.

Kado helped out around the house as much (or more?) than he ever had, which gave me the freedom to work on my art more. I quickly started to understand the value of having a real partner in life, and Kado went from being just a valuable helper to being completely irreplaceable.

Well, let’s just say I didn’t even make it through one full day of playing this before calling it “quits.” It turns out, after all this time, the game was just too complicated for me to figure out on the “fly”. I was getting frustrated, and a frustrated streamer is never fun to watch… so I swapped games and went to play Megaquarium. I still hold fond memories of this game, but it’s been too long, and I completely forgot how “clunky” the user interface of this game was, and how utterly difficult the game was. Will I go back and play it again? Probably not. Will I still smile when I think about this game in the past? Heck yeah. Just not planning to play it again!