What's New - Vol. 9

The information here is probably useless, as it is created to help me orgnaize my ideas. However, I would be very glad if it helps someone.

Balatro

The nominees of The Game Awards release. There are not many funny games this year. Thus, I am not interested in any game of the year nominee. Maybe I can create a post about my something of the year?

I played Balatro this week. I had played Black Myth, Metaphor, and Elden Ring before. I don't have a PlayStation 5, so I am not able to play other nominees like Astro Bot and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Thus, Balatro is the only game I can play before the event.

I may give it a rating like 3/5. It is not bad, but I am not a fan of Rougelike games. The design is not bad, and it is much eaiser to get involved, compared to other popular Rougelike games such as Dead Cells, The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon. However, that is also a drawback. Randomness plays a more important role than other games. In Balatro, if you cannot get good Jokers in early stages, the experience will be terrible. In other games, it can mitigated by the operation of players. Roughly, my experience is not good on average.

To my surprise, Balatro is a game created by LÖVE. The shadow of cards is rendered quite well in the game, which causes me to think that the game is created with 3D engines like Unity. It blowed my mind of the power of pixel arts, and the power of love2d.

I am looking forward to the development of Godot. Unluckily, there is no any good games created by it at present.

Steam Deck Utility

Recently, I wanted to create a utility to help install non-Steam games or patch existing games. However, I recognized that using the desktop mode was easy enough. Is it that necessary to create a dedicated app for that? I have no idea.

I may come back to it after I come up with good UX.

Economy

I finished the book, China's Guaranteed Bubble: How Implicit Government Support Has Propelled China's Economy While Creating Systemic Risk , this week. As the world's second largest economy, why did it grew that fast before, but get into crisis recently? This book can provide you a very good overview of it.

There are lots of too big to fall organizations. Investors, mainly bankers, believe that the govenment will save them during crisis, so they provide loans without thinking of risks. And these organizations, also believing that they will be saved whenever the bubble breaks, spend money no matter how low the ROI is. Such situation enlarges the bubble and causes lots of potential issues.

I strongly recommend this book to any one who is interested and hesitated about whether to increase investment exposure recently.