180 Lunches

  • Best Games: Blue Prince

    Another great game enters the Best Games of the 2020’s today, and we bid farewell to a modern throw back to the arcade beat’em up.

    Blue Prince (2025) goes on as #13

    I love a good escape room and a good board game. What about both? This game took our house by storm. The rare game that I pitched my wife on and she stuck around for. She stuck around for the combination of strategically managing probabilities, testing theories, and pulling every thread till we could solve it’s core puzzle.

    What pushes me away from most puzzle games is either my dumb brain or single dependencies for progress. See The Witness or Outer Wilds. Blue Prince is the perfect balance of learning something new, setting it aside, and progressing toward the next bit. Stumped by a puzzle, don’t give up, move on to learn more. That puzzle might make sense in three hours. If you wrote it down in your notebook of course.

    TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge (2022) is off the list. My wife, youngest, and I had a blast with this game playing couch co-op. It was a fun and well crafted homage to the 90’s arcade games of my youth.

  • Slate Truck

    This little and cheap electric truck made the rounds over the weekend, after it was revealed by it’s Michigan based start up. Cheap is an understatement if it can actually stick the landing on it’s $20K price point. And the barebones to hobbyist modular design approach is compelling. Color me interested enough to pay attention, but not get on the wait list just yet.

    Also side note, it is little, but not as little as the video would have you believe. The host showing it off later on reveals he is 6’10”. I feel like you have to get that out up front. I thought this thing was built for people under 5’10” at first.

  • New Music: Devil Ultrasonic Dream

    Earlier this month a new record dropped from Teen Mortgage. A stand out group in my continuous rediscovery of rock and punk since a long hiatus in my youth.

  • Best Games: Split Fiction

    Another game enters the Best Games of the 2020’s today, and we say “toodaloo” to an inspired take on the modern search action genre.

    Split Fiction (2025) goes on as #38

    Everybody loved It Takes Two, I’m more of a Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons man myself. Well, actually I didn’t find anyone to play it with and was jealous of all the people that did. So when their next game was announced I was paying attention.

    Split Fiction mostly reminds me of Wario Party. But wrapped in a narrative, and fun art, and spectacle, but the mini games are longer, and creatively thoughtful about how two people will do them together. So not Wario Party, but you get it. It is at it’s best when everything it’s doing is in service of asynchronous cooperative game play that changes just often enough to not get stale.

    It does that 9 times out of 10, and that 10th time is when it over stays it’s welcome. Either a mechanic or mini game just stops clicking and you get to look around at the set dressing that is holding everything up and question it. But not for long, because you’ve just been whisked into a side story where you are pig that does big farts. Now we are back to the fun and your doing it with a friend.

    Metroid Dread (2021) is off the list. My entire run of this game was a week at the beach for Thanksgiving. It had my full attention and was a great modern take on the genre it inspired. But when I got back to regular life I never went back to it.

  • Game Changer s7

    Holy shit did the new season drop with a banger. Hour plus episode, with three contestants I love, left to their own devices for a year to complete a series of challenges. The behind the scenes that came out the following week is an excellent 40 minutes companion piece. Apparently the first edit was over 2 hours, not gonna lie, I’d watch that.

    Dropout continues to be worth every penny I pay for it. Killer D&D + improve comedy, there isn’t another service out there offering such a concentrated dose of goodness for your cash.

  • Insta: Anatomy of a scroll

    The amount of time I spend on my phone killing time or seeking distraction out of habit is regularly concerning to me. Not capital “C” concerning, like what state will this world be in when my kids inherit it. But lower case “c” concerning, like am I rotting my brain on this stuff, when I could be doing anything more constructive.

    I picked Instagram as my app of choice a while ago and then further refined that to be a source of inspiration. Mostly following artist, musicians, sports, and skateboarding. But that intent has been massively diluted over the years. My anecdotal experience is one jammed up with ads, suggested accounts, and often more videos than pictures. So lets test it with some real world tracking, ten days, scroll through 15 post, and see what gets served up.

    DateFollowedSponsoredSuggested
    Tue 3/18 @ 12:30pm1050
    Wed 3/19 @ 8:45am447
    Thu 3/20 @ 9:30pm843
    Fri 3/21 @ 7:30am942
    Sat 3/22 @ 3:00pm825
    Sun 3/23 @ 7:00pm456
    Mon 3/24 @ 7:30am555
    Tue 3/25 @ 8:00am753
    Wed 3/26 @ 8:45am852
    Thu 3/27 @ 8:00pm645
    Total (%)69 (46%)43 (29%)38 (25%)
    Instagram lets you change your view to only accounts you follow, but it is not the default view and resets back to allowing for “suggested” content every time you open it.

    There is always room for conformation bias doing something like this. But this little exercise certainly confirmed my anecdotal experience of feeling like I am seeing more and more stuff I didn’t intentionally sign up for. The pipeline is rotten and more of it keeps coming into my head.

  • New Music: Chicken & Sauce

    That Mexican OT + Sauce Walka and a whole album? I have fallen off my new music feed, but this is a killer surprise to start the weekend.

  • Best Games: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2

    I’m continuing to prime the pump with new ideas here. Similar to the Best of Richmond, the Best Games of the 2020’s series will be a continuous list of, you guessed it, the best games I’ve played in the 2020s. The list is mostly complete through 2024, though there are some older games that are on my backlog that will surely make an appearance. Post-wise, as I play games that unseat top 50 incumbents on the list, they will come off and new games will go on. Today’s inaugural entry…

    Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 goes on as #25

    The game I’ve easily put the most time into in 2025. Not only because it requires it, as a highly immersive, open world, role playing game, but because it’s hooks got in deep. It is essentially a medieval times game with systems on top of systems. Every action you take, be it conversation, a fight you pick, an item you steal, seems to have some form of consequence or impact on the world. Fight bandits in the woods and get covered in mud and blood. You better wash up and change clothes before talking to a merchant if you don’t want to pay higher prices.

    That is one silly example, but it is just a foothold into the matrix of systems that underlie a game with great story, writing, world building, relationships, factions, and more. And it is all built in the CryEngine, as in Crysis and Far Cry. All that means is that it plops you down in a beautiful and detailed landscape. Roaming from town to town on horse back reminds me tons of Red Dead. In fact, it is easiest to sum it up as “Red Dead 2, but 14th century Europe”. From top to bottom a great game.

    Valheim (2021) is off list. Still a great game, but it’s early access 15 minutes of fame didn’t stand the test of time when I went back in 2024 to play it with my kids. The progression felt punishing the second time through, and the mystery that sustained that

    Coming soon…

  • Great Falls

    Stealing the opportunity to test video to gif from Mike, of a trip we took to Great Falls National Park during the kids spring break earlier this month. “Billy Goat Trail” is an awesome medium to hard hike on the way to beautiful 360 views of the falls. Worth a visit.

  • ABCs of Richmond

    In December last year, on the side of a chilly field, a fellow soccer parent let my wife and I know about a novel concept. The restaurant ABCs. His family had been partaking in a 2024 goal to go to a new restaurant in Richmond for every letter in the alphabet. Could we do that? Our kids are old enough, we should get out more, why not?

    Introducing our very own 2025 ABCs of Richmond. We didn’t commit to it until late February, but have been running up our list recently. I’ll keep the page going with the collected entries and periodically post about new additions here.

    E. Eazzy Burger

    Killer burgers and fries tucked between Ardent and ZZQ. Already two of our favorite spots in town. The outdoor seating and ready access to excellent beer got a big thumbs up from our whole crew.

    G. Gersi

    We went to this little Italian spot in the Fan with friends after numerous recommendations. Everyone was right. Daily handmade pasta and crisp cocktails. I’d recommend the Gersi Manhattan and a reservation ahead of time.

    H. Henley on Grace

    A wine bar with upscale food, right near the Carpenter Theatre. We already had tickets to a show, and needed an “H”. We were treated to fantastic service, atmosphere, food, drink, and great night out.