Ape's Enrichment: October 19, 2026
I skipped one last week. That will happen sometimes; I was tired, and I'm currently dealing with some wrist pain that's thankfully on a great track in no part due to my week-or-so-long abstinence from clickety-clacking at my desk after work hours.
Active Enrichment
- Super Mario World is still Super Mario World. No notes here.
- Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a great remaster of a Wii game I only faintly remembered. This is the exact Disney weirdo shit that I'm into, so even though it was only slightly above-average all things considered (as long as you don't bother with the underbaked backtracky sidequests) I absolutely loved it. As much as I'm wary about nostalgia-bait rhetoric, I don't think today's Disney would allow a game that takes so many bizarre liberties with their properties. This is a game where you scale a toxic mountain of broken and discarded Mickey merch & memorabilia, battle a sinister It's a Small World clock tower, and are given full liberties to play Mickey Fucking Mouse Himself as an evil lil murderous prick.
- Parking Garage Rally Circuit rips. I'm a sucker for drift-boosting mechanics, and the way this game lets you generate ludicrous speed by chaining drifts is intoxicating. The tracks are far more inventive than you'd imagine from a game about going 'round and 'round a hotel garage, but it occasionally steps on its toes a bit with how the jump ramps tend to send you tumbling for seemingly no reason (skill issue).
Cognitive Enrichment
- Started Foundation's Edge, the 4th book in Asimov's Foundation series. Once again I find myself let down by a lack of compelling characters, but completely captured by everything else. The ideas are as lofty as ever and the central mystery may be the most compelling yet.
Visual Enrichment
- Cregger's Resident Evil was a nice, inventive haunted house. Hollywood needs more tight-90-minutes like this.
- You Can See Everything is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, maybe? Go see it!
- House of 1,000 Corpses was honestly a let-down? This is partially my fault for letting it sit on my backlog for so long, it kind of began to build itself up in status. I love the batshit-crazy editing and everything about the killers, but the protagonists/victims were just not doing it for me, the kills were rather uninventive, and the humor didn't land. I still enjoyed my time!
- Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam is finished after a long, long viewing period & hiatus. The pacing just drags so much towards that middle section, to the detriment of its breakneck pace finale. I love those last few episodes, but I have a lot of complicated thoughts overall. A lot of my complaint lies with the villains; villains in Zeta tend to fall on a binary of "objectively evil shit person" or "tragic victim of brainwashing/manipulation" (which also, with a very notable exception or two, tend to fall on a gender line as well), whereas '78 played a lot more in that uncomfortable middle ground. Moving on to ZZ next!
Social Enrichment
- Pirate GURPS got cancelled. Since I know only 5 of you read these, I'm gonna let you in on a secret: I feel pretty demoralized by this one! I'm gonna try to get another session going and if we aren't able to get going in the next two weeks it's time to reconsider the project. That's life!
- Had a lovely, interesting experience at a friend's birthday. He asked to play some Mario Kart, and to save myself the effort of setting up my Switch 2 dock at a friend's, I brought my external drive loaded up with emulators to play some Double Dash and later Timesplitters 2. I won't pretend touching Timesplitters for the first time in over 10 years wasn't part of this, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was a part of what I've felt I'd been missing from life. In-person connection that isn't just catching up, where there isn't much pressure to "perform" like I can't help but force myself to feel when I GM, there was something so communal about this experience. Fucking look at me talking about Local Multiplayer like I've found Jesus. Phone and Computer has us all kinds of fucked up.
- Halloween Archipelago randomizer began last week! I'm playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and in the (pretty liberal with the theming) mix, there's Cloverpit, Doom, Luigi's Mansion, Rain World, and Signalis. I'm having a killer time hanging out with my friends, except I've been blocked off from progression for the last 4 days or so; my best progression item (Mist Form) is behind an area in Rain World that the player doesn't have a gate key or whatever to access, so I'm just praying for a miracle right now. Such is the way of the Archipelago.
Blogs!
- In awe of the way Serket is just rolling through these Final Fantasy games. A post on Final Fantasy IV already!? Some very cool initative tech on display here.
- As a serial procrastinator, Viridian Void's Abandoning Prep meets me where I've been at for the last year or so. I tend to frontload an exciting burst of prep, then fizzle out and follow some formerly-indefinite principles to carry me through the rest of the game. If I was the type to pin sticky notes onto my monitor and GM screen, I would have the bullet points in the blog up there right now.
- We've got a Player Advice Blogwagon coming up! Blogwagons are exciting times, and I'm already struggling to keep up with these early entries. Looking forward to external incentive to come down from my little hobby-burnout tree fort.