An annual tradition started by Mike Suszek while he was at the now-defunt Joystiq, Four in February is a challenge to just complete four video games during the month of February.
I’ve attempted it a couple of times before and came close. I’ve decided to try it again, because lately I’ve been starting a lot of games, but never finishing any. Check out my picks below! I also plan on streaming some of my attempt: I don’t know if I’ll be streaming on Twitch, YouTube, or Mixer (or even all three simultaneously), but you can follow me on those platforms to find out.
I picked up Marvel’s Spider-Man on Black Friday, but I just haven’t gotten more than a couple hours into it yet. It’s not that the game is un-enjoyable – it’s very good from what I’ve played so far! I just haven’t made the time for it yet, so that’s what I’m going to do – make the time to play it through in February. If I speed through it quickly enough, I might even try to do the DLCs as well!
Update (Feb 2): I was right about it being very good! So good, that I completed the main story over the weekend! One game down, three to go. My progress will likely slow during the week, due to work, but I hope to get an hour or so of Pokemon in each night.
In what is a recurring theme for my Four in February picks, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is another one I just haven’t gotten to. By all accounts, it’s a beautiful, important, and well-acted game. The Game Awards trailer for Hellblade II was disturbingly great too. I can’t wait to put on my headphones for this one.
I got The Outer Worlds free with my CPU when I built my new computer (I should write about that!), but I’ve only put an hour or so into it. I was worried about putting an Obsidian-developed RPG in my list, as they can take a while, but then I saw it’s actually a fairly short one – only about 12-15 hours or so! So it’s time to give this a proper go!
I bought Pokemon Sword on launch day, and I got Pokemon Shield for Christmas, but I’m only a couple gyms into Sword, and I haven’t even started Shield. I tend to start a new Pokemon game very excitedly, but then rarely actually complete it, so it’s time to change that. I don’t know if I’ll just continue my Sword save, or if I’ll start a new save file on Shield, but either way I want to get through it. This will be a good one to play in bed on my Switch, so I can just tackle it a little at a time.
I’ll try to stream as I play these games (except for Pokemon, since I don’t have a capture card), and Twitch will be the primary platform with the PS4’s integrated support!
I recently finished moving this website to a new server. I didn’t change the server provider or anything like that, but I wanted to take advantage of some new stuff. Here’s why I did it, and some of the difficulties I encountered.
Why did I do a server migration?
I wanted to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 to take advantage of newer PHP and nginx versions. I could have attempted to upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 in place, but there were a lot of changes between those LTS versions, including how networking is handled. It seemed like the risk was just a little too high. I opted instead to build the system out on a new server, and then move all the website data to the new server. This had a few additional advantages as well:
I could switch from MySQL to MariaDB, a community developed version of MySQL that has gained support from several major tech companies. It also supposedly runs faster in some situations.
I could simplify my nginx configuration files. For each of my sites, my nginx configuration files are almost identical. Pretty much the only different parts are the server_name, paths to the ssl_certificate and ssl-certificate_key and the root for the website’s files. In building out a new server, I could move almost all of the configuration into snippets, making it easy to make changes to all of the sites at once. This will be useful in the future when some things change (like a newer PHP version).
I could entirely remove the andy-bell.com files. For a while I’ve been redirecting andy-bell.com to andy-bell.com, but I was doing so using a WordPress redirection plugin. Since andy-bell.com was literally just cloned from a backup of andy-bell.com, everything’s the same except new stuff. I took the opportunity to just nuke the old files and do the redirect from andy-bell.com to andy-bell.com solely in nginx. This also saved some time, since I wouldn’t need to move the files or database for andy-bell.com.
I use acme.sh for my SSL certificates. I was able to slightly improve things as I re-provisioned all the certs on the new server. (I just issued new certs on the new server so I wouldn’t have to move all the old ones over, plus now they will all renew on the same day, which will help me keep track of it better.)
Moving to the new server
It turned out to not be too difficult. Once I got the new server set up with nginx, PHP, and MariaDB, it wasn’t very hard to move all the old files over (I zipped them up on the old server, moved them straight from one server to the other, then unzipped them). Moving the databases wasn’t much harder. The only issue I had with the databases was one particularly large database that I had trouble with due to the file size. It was actually surprisingly smooth. To help ensure the move from one server to another moved quickly, as soon as I knew I wanted to move servers I changed the TTL (Time to Live) on my DNS settings to 5 minutes, so that it wouldn’t take too long for the DNS changes to propagate. Then 48 hours after I completed the move I turned the TTL back to the default setting!
I’m pretty pleased with the server performance, and I’m happy to be running on the latest Ubuntu LTS release. This should help keep things moving quickly and smoothly for years to come!
(Note: those Vultr links are affiliate links, because I really do like Vultr. If you use either of those links, and are active on Vultr for 30+ days with more than $10 in payments, then I’ll get a $10 credit, which is enough for 2 months of hosting for this site, not including tax.)
An annual tradition started by the now-defunt Joystiq, Four in February is a challenge to finally play a few of those games that we all just have lying around collecting (virtual) dust. The goal is to complete four games during the month of February.
I attempted it last year and came close. I successfully completed three games: Rise of The Tomb Raider, Far Cry 4, and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. I think I would have met the goal, had I not been sick for almost a week! I’m going to give it a try again this year. Check out my picks below! I also plan on streaming as much of my attempt as I can, so I’ll update the information below with archives of the streams as well!
Yeah, season 3 just came out. I’m a season behind, which is all the more reason to fire up season 2 and play it! I “enjoyed” season 1 (as much as you can enjoy a story like that), so I don’t know why I haven’t gotten around to playing season 2 yet. I recently picked it up when it was free through Twitch Prime though, so there’s no more excuses. It’s time to enter this tough and depressing world again.
This is a short one. I’ve heard it only takes one sitting to complete, but I’ve also heard nothing but good things about it. This is one that’s been sitting in my library for quite some time, but I just haven’t taken the time to play it. I’m going to finally fix that.
I’ve actually played about 4 hours of Darksiders II before, but then I just never came back to it. I remember thinking that it scratched the same sort of itch that the Legend of Zelda series did for me, so I think it’s time to give it another go. I’ll be starting over since I don’t really remember anything about the story or how to play the game, plus I’ll be playing on the newer Deathinitive Edition as it will hopefully be a little more compatible with Windows 10 than the older version. This one’s my long pick, as I expect it will take up to two weeks to complete.
That is why Undertale is my final pick for Four in February. I attended AGDQ 2017 a few weeks ago and was in the room for the Undertale run; the finale of the marathon. It looked pretty good, but when you’re skipping so much stuff, you don’t get a good sense of the story. So it’s time to play this game. I don’t even own it yet; I’m going to buy it specifically for this.
I haven’t been playing very many video games lately. Sure, I got sucked into Fallout 4 for about 40 hours, but then a whole lot of nothing. It’s time to break out of that. It’s time to actually play a few of the (very) many games that are lying untouched in my library.
4 in February is a yearly event, started by (the now defunct) Joystiq, challenging people to complete four unplayed video games during the month of February. The idea isn’t to go buy four new games, but to make it through four that you already have, but haven’t gotten around to.
With that in mind, it’s time to tackle a little of my backlog. Here’s my 4 in February.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Conveniently, Rise of the Tomb Raider makes its way onto PC on January 28th, just a few days before the start of February. Given just how much I love the Tomb Raider reboot (I’ve played through it twice), it’s no surprise that I want this one on my list to beat in February.
It’ll be very nice to look at as well – this Christmas I upgraded my PC with a new GTX 970, and that’s the card for the recommended spec!
Mission Accomplished!
That wasn’t quite as long as I expected. It only took about 12 hours to complete, and I powered through it in just 3 days. I streamed the whole thing – check out the recordings to the left!
Just Cause 2
Just Cause 3 just came out, but I think I’m going to wait for that to go on a better sale. In the meantime, Just Cause 2 is languishing in my Steam library, not even 2 hours played. I don’t remember much from the brief time I’ve already spent with the game, just that I think it was fun, and that it sure looks like it’ll be a lot more fun when I dedicate a proper amount of time to it.
Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People
Remember that great website HomestarRunner.com? The one that’s showing signs of coming back to life? Well, back in 2008 they partnered with Telltale Games to make a series of point-and-click adventures! This was back before Telltale’s games were basically just dialog trees and tough moral choices – they were legit point-and-clicks. I did play most of the first episode at one point, but there’s no way I remember how to do it at this point. It’s broken into 5 episodes, so I think I’ll just play one all the way through each night till I finish it.
Time Gentlemen, Please!
This is actually a sequel to the studio’s previous game Ben There, Dan That, but I won’t play that one first unless I’m making really good time on the others during the month. It’s an absurd comedy point-and-click adventure game, but most importantly it’s kinda short. It’s only about 6 hours long according to user submissions at How Long to Beat. With two big AAA games in my lineup this month, I’ll need a shorter one to serve as a palate cleanser.
So there it is. The four games I’ll be trying to tackle in February. I think I have a good mix, even though two of them are point-and-click adventures. I’ve got a little snack-sized game, an episodic game with easy stopping points, a sandbox mayhem generator, and an epic action adventure. I’ll probably be streaming my time with these games when I can on my Twitch channel (or maybe YouTube instead). We’ll see how I did on March 1st!
The premiere of my short film Quality Time is tonight! Watch the trailer below, and below that is the when and where!
Michael can’t stand his roommate, though the issue is almost entirely in Michael’s head. One morning, a chemical emergency happens, trapping them both in one room for about six hours, and trapping Michael in what he sees as his own personal hell. During their hours together, he must (try to) learn to put up with John. In the end, he learns nothing, because it’s more funny that way.
Premiere
See Quality Time and 19 other short films produced in the last several months!
