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If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know about my yearly tradition that I refer to as the “Years in Review” where I attempt to track the games I play in a given year. I don’t go into a ton of detail in this process, mostly it is just a hashmark of “Was this game played during this month” and it doesn’t go into much detail to quantify how much something was played. Other bloggers do similar things, and one of the more interesting versions of this is from The Ancient Gaming Noob where he has used a software tracking tool called ManicTime to log actual hours in specific games. There was a time when I briefly kicked around the notion of writing something to do this for me… all in the name of attempting to replace functionality that Raptr used to do.

Last year I learned that my friend Kevin Brill had been working on precisely this side project and had made quite a good deal of movement towards a production client. Essentially, TempusGameIt, as he calls it, is an application that you install and hangs out in your system tray and then utilizes an application detection library to log when you are playing specific games. This information gets uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers and quietly tracks the games that you are playing, matching them against its database of existing games. I had known this was a functionality that existed, but with the New Year, I decided to support this project and become an active guinea pig. So since the beginning of the year, I have been keeping the client updated and logging my gameplay.

I’ve wanted to talk about this application for a bit, but decided I should probably get permission from Kevin before diving into it and introducing my audience. Right now this is mostly an application that has been bouncing around on the Gamepad.club Mastodon server with a handful of us testing it, but I believe I am the only person who is actively running it all of the time. Essentially there is currently a Mac and a PC Client with some side discussion about potentially creating a Linux client at some point. This installs a service on your local machine and when you double-click the icon in your system tray it opens a webpage at http://localhost:45000/ that allows you to configure various options. You can publicly log your time or privately do so… which makes certain aspects of the data only available to you. You also need to configure which drives you want it to scan and identify games on. Essentially each time you install new software as it stands currently you will need to run another sweep of your drives. For me, I technically have games on three of my four drives so I have it inventorying those.

Under Catalog it will show what games have been detected. Occasionally the same game shows up multiple times, specifically if there is for example a 32-bit and a 64-bit executable. If a game does not exist currently in the known catalog of available games, there is also the option for you to add it which involves you searching for the game title and then selecting which process currently running in memory represents that game. I’ve done this for a few things that had not been seen yet like Fallout 76 and more recently City of Heroes. Once the game has been detected and is in your local Catalog, the detection from that point forward just works “automagically”. I believe there is some sort of minimum session length, as there have been a few times I have seen my sessions get ignored if I accidentally launched the wrong game for example as I occasionally do with Steam when I click the wrong listing.

From there everything pretty much takes care of itself. Your session data will begin showing up in your local interface as well as when you are logged in through the TempusGameIt server. The application has several different ways to slice the data and in truth, this is probably going to be perfect for most users. For example, this is a snapshot of a weekly view showing how much time I spent in games. Right now my data is heavily skewing the usage patterns of the application as a whole, but I am hoping as more folks start using it the global data becomes a bit more interesting. I’ve requested to have a raw export option because in truth I would rather dump my information and fiddle with it in google sheets than have reports compiled for me. At a minimum, I plan on using this information to feed into my “Years in Review” process, but I think I will be able to generate far more specific data than I have ever before.

There is a bunch of functionality that I have never touched as well. Supposedly the application can detect new screenshots from specific applications and have those uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers as well. Additionally, there is a methodology for linking to various game accounts and tracking achievements. The fact that I have my profile fairly locked down in Steam and tend to run in “show offline” mode seems to be throwing an error when it attempts to track achievements there per a discussion with Kevin last night. There are also a lot of ideas that are planned for the application and you can see where various features are on the roadmap via the Trello board. There is also a discord server for discussions and feature requests, but I think for the moment Kevin and I are the only ones who have joined it. For the moment this is a passion project, but one that I personally think is really freaking cool. At some point, if there is ever a Patreon or something of the sort to fund development I will probably pitch into it. For the moment it is doing a functionality that has been missing since Raptr, and it will be interesting to see how this service evolves. I’ve not talked about it a ton to this point, but I figured if nothing else I would share it with my readers. For the most part it “just works” and has required little fiddling. There have been a few things I have talked back and forth with Kevin about and have helped debug a few problems but the majority of the time it quietly does what it is supposed to be doing. The post Tempus GameIt appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Friends… I had a rough night. Yesterday morning when I woke up I could not catch my breath no matter how hard I tried. As a card-carrying severe asthmatic, this was a feeling that I was intimately aware of… but for some reason, this felt different. My lungs were clear and I seemed to not be having any difficulty breathing. This went away and as the day moved forward I just sort of felt a general sense of “shitty”. I was having occasional abdominal pains and side pains but never the sort of thing that you could really pin down to anything. I had a wild headache and as I went into the evening the unable to catch my breath part carried forward and was joined by what I can only term a “flutter” in my heart where it felt like it would race for a few seconds and give me a “whoa that does not feel right” feeling and then return to normal. So around 9 pm, I decided we probably needed to go to the ER when I finally found my damned blood pressure cuff and got a reading of 155/99. This is one of those shitty wrist things so not exactly accurate but considering it was reading my wife as normal… I decided it warranted a trip. By the time I made it to the ER and was seen by their triage folks my blood pressure was 210/110 and my inability to catch my breath was pretty much a constant. So I spent my evening hooked to electrodes, with an IV in my arm, and everything angrily beeping at me. I am okay… other than the fact that I am exhausted still and also generally feel like crap. I just sort of feel like I fell down the stairs or something because everything aches. The takeaway… inconclusive. I was in fact having some sort of very high blood pressure moment. However, there is no clear sign as to why. My blood panels came back fine as did both a COVID and Flu test. I spent the entire evening hooked up to an EKG yoke… which also came back fine and I was told by the ER doctor that for the most part things looked healthy and operating as expected. So we have this situation where I was obviously in some form of distress but there were no physiological signs for why. Their working theory is that I have some sort of viral infection because there were signs that my body was trying to fight off something. Throughout the evening they called out a handful of things that mostly blurred by as I was fading in out and out. At some point, they gave me a cocktail of meds intravenously and the rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. They also called in a prescription for a dose pack of steroids, but we were far too out of it last night to wait for the pharmacy to fill that. So at some point today I am going to go pick that up. Essentially today I am going to try and take it easy, and get some sleep/rest. I mostly feel bad for putting my wife through all of this and giving her what is going to be a rough day after very little sleep. I feel simultaneously dumb for going to the ER and also vindicated that something was in fact going on… enough to cause my blood pressure to spike so high. I do feel a bit better though that from all signs my heart seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. My X-Rays basically showed the shit state of my lungs… but that is to be expected for a 47-year-old with severe asthma. Anyways. This is the sort of post that I make and then do not syndicate at all. This is only for myself and my most dedicated readers. I use my blog as a way of marking major events in my life along with the normal shenanigans that I get up to. It would feel weird NOT to record this event for posterity. The post Fun with Electrodes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday we had a Sony State of Play event, and with it was released some more information about the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reboot saga. There is a part of me that is excited to see more information about this game, and then another part… that is deeply disappointed that it will be released on the PlayStation 5 first. That is not out of some sort of misplaced console fanboyism… because I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X. I am fairly agnostic in the console wars. What I am not agnostic about however is the fact that my platform of preference is the PC and my method of play preference is the keyboard and mouse. I often times falter and buy into the hypestorm surrounding a new game. However, I have to examine my track record specifically with major console titles.

Horizon Forbidden West was a game that I had been looking forward to almost more than any other. However I also greatly preferred playing this game on the PC, so when I console release came out I spent about a week playing it… before bouncing and returning to something PC-based. I got frustrated with just how fiddly aiming with a controller was, and how it was hard to read some of the text because we do not have a mammoth-sized television in the livingroom. Then again there was the challenge with the livingroom in general and it mostly being a “public space” and not something that I felt like I could commandeer for long. So now I find myself in a holding pattern waiting and hoping for an eventual PC release of the game so I can finally play it on my platform of choice.

Before HFW, there was Ghost of Tsushima a game that I enjoyed quite a bit. However, the entire time I was playing it… there was a niggling thought in the back of my head about how much I would enjoy the game more if I could play with WASD and Mouse controls. Everything about the game would have been immediately improved if I could just control it the way that I wanted to control it. I made it to the second major area in the game and then bounced because I just didn’t really want to play it with a controller. So I am now sitting in this holding pattern of hoping that maybe one day it also gets a PC release, or that I suddenly switch religion and decide to pick up the controller.

Then there are the games that I bought on console… and ultimately rebought the game on PC much later. Jedi Fallen Order even on PC, goes to a lot of trouble to tell you that playing it with a keyboard and mouse is the wrong way to play. However, I remember when this game first came out, I bounced pretty early into the game. I think I gave it about a weekend and made it to Kashyyyk before completely dropping the game in favor of something else that drew away my attention on the PC. Later I came back on PC with a Keyboard and Mouse and consumed this game hungrily, playing nothing but it until I got the credit roll.

Similarly, there is the case of the first Final Fantasy VII Remake game. I started on the console because it again was a console exclusive to PlayStation, and I didn’t even make it out of the first major area. Then later when it was released on PC via the Epic Game Store, I picked the game up and played it through to completion. The mouse and keyboard controls, while often an afterthought by Squaresoft felt so much better than a controller for me. I had so much fun with this game, but it was largely in part that I got to play it in my way on my platform of choice.

More recently we have the case of Final Fantasy XVI, which again… released as a PlayStation platform exclusive. I bought the game… and I made it about ten minutes into the game before deciding that I didn’t really want to experience it in this manner. So I’ve spent the money… but can’t seem to wrap my brain around wanting to play it on that platform. Everything seems to indicate that the game did not meet sales expectations from SquareSoft, but then again they always seem to say that. My hope is that it legitimately did not… and as a result, it will get a PC release sooner rather than later. I want to experience the game, but I want to experience it in the most comfy manner… with a keyboard and mouse.

So while I am happy as all get out to see more information about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and am really looking forward to the game. I am going to try my damnedest to stick to my guns and ignore it until the game releases on my platform of choice. It has happened too damned many times at this point… that I get excited about a game and then ultimately bounce because I don’t really want to play it on my console. Sure it is dumb that I own both brands of consoles and they mostly collect dust… but it is what it is.

I think I am just coming to realize how much playing with a mouse and keyboard means to my enjoyment of a game. I am not entirely certain WHY I am wired this way, given that I grew up with the NES, SNES, and Genesis. I also played a ton of games on the PlayStation and Dreamcast era but after that… I dove hard into PC gaming as my primary platform. Controllers just end up making my hand cramp, which I get is probably the exact opposite for most gamers. I would love for this not to be the case because gaming in general seems to be leaning more and more into controllers as the default input method… but I am not exactly sure how to change that. The post WASD Stan appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.