revlob

The grail diary continues to be filled with the desperate scrawls of an explorer unsure whether each note he encounters is the final piece of some grand puzzle, or mere graffiti from the ruin's denizens. I've moved on considerably since my last post, but my progress has halted somewhat, as I've encountered a second progress-stymying bug. The good news is that the developers are aware of both issues and are working to rectify them as soon as possible. There are one or two avenues of investigation left for me to pursue in the meantime, but I do hope we get a patch soon. There are some wonderfully tricky puzzles in this game, however they have a habit of only revealing their solutions once I've started to feel a little exasperated, so removing these blockers would give me some relief.

In mangaka years that's like 416.

You can catch live fish and turn them into cooked meals at a fabricator. You don't have to knife them first. Eating them raw from your inventory doesn't give you much sustenance. Bladderfish can be turned into fresh water, but by crafting bleach (requires salt and a type of coral cut using a knife, I think) you can make larger quantities. You can craft higher capacity tanks at a fabricator, but I can't remember if you start with the recipe or not. You'll want to explore wrecks and find other lifepods to discover new recipes.

Four bosses down, and I've just discovered the double-jump, which opens up a number of additional routes to explore. I've encountered a bug which may have screwed my progress though, I've logged it with the developer and hopefully I don't have to go back to an earlier save. Just in case anyone wants to know:

Does anyone know what's happening with the Ace Attorney games on Switch? I thought I read somewhere Capcom were working on a collection, I've only played the first in the series and have wanted to play the others for ages.

Looks fine, although when I went into our local Korean supermarket to buy ingredients, the chap who worked there and was very helpful looked at me funny when I said the recipe I was using asked for carrot. He seemed to think it didn't belong, and said he used to make kimchi using 200 cabbage heads with his grandparents. Fish sauce and salted shrimp I think are more commonly used than fish stock, but as long as you get your cabbage and your chili right, the rest is a matter of preference. The recipe I used was Maangchi's, and I've had word recently from my friend that his Korean wife gave my kimchi the thumbs up. The video was helpful to me too. Issues?

19 hours! That's how long it took me to locate the third boss. In that time I've unearthed all kinds of weapons and items, and maxed out the storage in the text app. I was about to give up hope and shamelessly seek advice online, but I finally located the one thing I'd overlooked this evening. Props to anyone sticking with this, doubly so if you're doing it without assistance.

News of Stewart returning for more Star Trek shouldn't be automatically received as if it were the second coming. Movie Picard was awful, so I'm going to withhold my excitement until we hear more about the structure and the staff behind this new project. There's no suggestion yet that this will be anything like TNG, and a show like TNG probably couldn't be made these days anyway. Having said that, Stewart is a great actor and he seems like a top bloke, so I'm hoping he gets an opportunity to do what he does best in a show that does something interesting with the material. Everyone goes on about The Best of Both Worlds, but it was episodes like Family where Star Trek illustrated it could have heart and soul with a Shakespearian actor exploring what it really means to be human in the 24th Century. That's what I really want to see from this; Stewart bawling his eyes out and destroying his family's grape crop mud wrestling with his brother.

What didn't you like about it? Do you like games of that type (Magic etc.)?

Card #123 in your deck will be functionally exactly the same as card #123 in any other deck, so if you sleeved the cards to obscure their backs then there's no technical reason you couldn't replace a card or even construct your own decks, unless you're playing in a tournament.

Richard Garfield's been posting a little about it on BGG and here's what I've learnt: When you buy a deck, inside the pack you'll get 37 cards. One of those is the identity card and also serves as a checklist detailing the deck's contents, but the other 36 will be 12 cards belonging to three of the game's seven factions. Every deck has a unique name (printed on every card) and a unique card back, so you cannot remove a card from one deck and put it in another (at least, not according to the standard tournament rules). You've no idea what's in your deck until you open its box. The starter set contains two fixed decks which will be exactly the same in every set and serve to teach the game, but you are also given two random decks just like you'd buy separately. The first set has about 370 unique cards. There's still a rarity aspect to individual cards determining the frequency with which they'll show up, but some cards have a 'special' rarity, meaning the algorithm which determines the cards in any given deck isn't completely random. For example, there are four "Horsemen" cards, but if you have any one of them then your deck will have all four. There's also some checks to ensure that cards which play off the keywords of others aren't rendered useless by those keywords not being present in the deck.

I made kimchi. It's pretty good for a first go.

Yeah I'm left scratching my head at a few details. The selling-the-whole-deck-as-a-booster concept is a pretty ballsy idea, but I wonder just how much life there is in a game with zero deck construction. How much of 'meta' is there when your entire deck is predetermined for you, at random?

This isn't a spoiler as such, but a warning I'd have appreciated: Nothing a more careful player wouldn't already do, but something that cost me a bit of time unnecessarily.

Ha ha! I'm two bosses in too, @easternheath. Found the second sigil today though. I've got my own grail diary I'm filling with maps and notes, it's proven helpful to keep track of routes I can't access yet. Loving the difficulty, it's just the right side of brutal.