My Time at Portia

My Time at Portia

cozy but outdated graphics and bad UI

2023-12-23

Today's Video Game A Day is My Time at Portia on the Switch. It's your typical farm simulator in a small town, so definitely has similarities to Stardew Valley right there. But a lot more similarities. A family member left you the farm, an absent father instead of dead granpa. There's some backstory about a country you're at war with? The Duvo Empire.

It has more RPG elements. But one thing I saw is the exact same stamina wheel as Zelda Breath of the Wild.

The style is idyllic small town, kind of like a Studio Ghibli movie. And it has a "retro" look in that this seems like it's actually a GameCube game, with not as high quality graphics.

I don't think looking like an older game was an aesthetic choice. I have a few games that intentionally look like an N64 game. I think they went with this to be able to play on mobile.

Now that I think about it, I'm not drawn to games that try to look like an N64 or PS1 game, but that's not any different than pixel art games trying to look like they're from the SNES. That just wasn't the era I got into gaming to feel nostalgic about.

But being simpler graphics at least means higher framerate and smooth camera.

It has a feeling of an MMO where the world looks emptier and simpler as if to accomodate players on different quests, but this is a single player game.

The UI is not polished in this game. Cut scenes were abrupt. There's tips taking up a good part of upper left that I can't seem to dismiss and can't read all of without a way to bring up a screen that shows them all which annoys me. The map on the screen isn't that good, and I don't know what to do for the first task to get an axe.

I'm not going to play this one any more.

Speaking of video games, my wife and I finished playing Myst. I've played it plenty of times, and she played it at some point, but neither of us has played it for years. This was the latest release of Myst with modern graphics. I got it for my new Xbox Series S. It looks great, and the gameplay is basically the same, just using a controller basically as a mouse can be tedious.

It was really fun to come back to this game, and great to play it with my wife. She's not a gamer, so she watched me control the game but we both worked on the puzzles and talked about what to try to solve them.

I got most of my Christmas stuff done which is a relief. For once I actually started right after Thanksgiving. We got decorations up in time, I'm not rushing to get presents. Instead of saying I have a ton of time, until there isn't then I have a week to stress about doing everything and can't enjoy anything. It helped that Thanksgiving was earlier, it felt like we had an extra week to prepare for Christmas. We actually celebrated some, mostly watching old Christmas specials, but we went out to the decorated zoo then botanical gardens.

I write this site in Visual Studio Code in Ubuntu. I used to use simple editors like Brackets or Atom, but those either stopped being supported or just don't work for me. Code was the closest I've found that works how I want. But damn is stuff like the autocomplete annoying. I finally found how to disable it, and holy shit this is so much more enjoyable. Search for "suggestion" in the settings and disable stuff like accept on commit character or quick suggestions, and whatever else those link to.

I'm going through my bookmarks for things to share and dang looking at oldest I found what looks like going back to 2007.

Here's today's link: endless hoooooooooooooooorse.