Souls Like Strings

Beats up your heart along with the baddies

Why

• Typically Yakuza drama with heart
• Side stories are also typically fun, the cabaret club in particular
• Deuteragonist structure used to brilliant effect

Why Not

• Bosses have a lot of health & huge difficulty spikes
• Kuze epitomises 'How many times must I teach you this lesson old man?'
• Majima is too much of a real person for later games to make sense haha

Impressions

After playing (and loving) Like a Dragon I decided to jump back to where it all began for some context on...

• Any meeting with more than one product manager will result in 0 decisions and a future meeting with just the product managers
• Creating a global FormStore shared by all your components
  • might make sense for some cases like long, complex forms with many different input
  • but makes absolutely no sense for a form with 4 inputs with virtually no validation
  • and having the global form store can lead to fun bugs like the balance entered for the previous account showing up on the next one
• Always check information isn't already available to the frontend before trying...

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Godlike cyborgs re-enact Romeo & Juliet across untold millenia

Kinda surprised I liked this as much as I did; the prose feels overly flowery, the seemingly omnipotent technology the protagonists have access and its implications are mostly handwaved as irrelevant and there's not much going on plot-wise other than an enemies to lovers romance. Despite all that I really enjoyed the ~2 hours it took to finish; the limited world-building does what it needs to by setting up background intriuge and it's fun...

Light Souls?

Why

• Interesting, original IP and world in a big budget game
• Combat strongly encourages thinking & using abilities
• Strikes an ideal balance between combat, exploration puzzles & platforming
• Great aesthetic and worldbuilding, dark in tone not visuals

Why Not

• Surprisingly tough combat, don't assume it's a game for kids

Impressions

Kena looks like a children's game with bright visuals, beautiful vistas and cute sidekicks. Writing it off as such would be a mistake though, as the cheery aesthetics come hand in hand with a challenging combat system, satisfying puzzle platforming/exploration and a...

• Still on eslint/react-hooks, there are so many complex things to think about in order to use hooks 'correctly'
  • Made even harder when it's a giant legacy codebase and the people with context are gone;
    • do I need to lift this state rather than updating it in an effect or can I just remove the effect which updates it when props change?
    • why would the props for something like the default value of a search input even change in the first place?
• Not much else this week, Wednesday was a bpublic holiday and I...