fi ar ol pobl yn aciwso fi o fod yn tuedd yn yr eisteddfod at y gogs: 'faint mor wa-a-a-a-ael gallaf fod? dwi jyst yn neud be sy'n dod yn naturiol'

It was Easter last weekend. Since we moved across the country, events like this mean travelling back to spend the holidays with my family. This also means not having my gaming PC with me. My laptop was bought to support me with my job and my dissertation thesis. So while it’s good to use with Word and SPSS and R, it’s not made for playing games. And yet, I can run a few games on the laptop. The choices are limited, though. I can log into Rift and Lotro to get my daily items, but I can’t comfortably play the games (well, Lotro I could, but it just doesn’t look nice enough on my laptop, so I don’t want to).

Not that I have lots of gaming time when I’m visiting my family, of course. But let’s be honest here, being with your parents again can be a bit weird and it’s nice to have a little resort in the shape of playing a computer game.

Except for the first picture, all photos were taken out of a moving car (I wasn’t the one driving, of course…) with a smartphone that’s known for having a great battery life but a very bad camera.

It was really nice to see my “home” again. The pictures aren’t from my town, but from the state (in the middle of Germany) we both grew up in. Northern Germany is much flatter in terrain and has a different style of old houses. Nowadays, houses are usually built the same way throughout Germany. And because Northern Germany is pretty much flat, there are also less old castle ruins on hills. I love seeing them in the scenery, though. So whenever we go back, I just enjoy the scenery with all the hills and castle ruins.

But back to my “gaming woes” when I’m with my family. Terraria works fine, but I’m usually not in the mood to start a game of Terraria. Then there is GOG with its library of old games, of course. But one game that I usually don’t play here at home is Mini Metro. The last few times we’ve been visiting my family, I always ended up playing Mini Metro, though – mostly the daily challenge. Mini Metro is basically a “city-builder” puzzle game with minimalistic graphics. You choose a city (represented by a one-colour background and lakes, rivers etc. in blue), then watch stations spawn and then choose where and how to build your public rail transit lines. Graphically, it’s a very basic and easy game, but it does get challenging as you need to figure out the optimal way to build lines and where to put extra trains, carriages etc while the passenger count keeps growing. It’s just that when I’m at my main gaming PC and have time to play a game, I hardly ever choose Mini Metro. But when visiting family, it’s the perfect little game to relax my mind for a bit. And usually, for a week or two afterwards, I still play Mini Metro back here at home… until I forget the game even exists again and play different games like Elder Scrolls Online or Tropico 6 which definitely don’t run on my gaming laptop.

Screenshot Saturday: Not a gaming-laptop It was Easter last weekend. Since we moved across the country, events like this mean travelling back to spend the holidays with my family.