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February 2026 Retrospective

I'm not gonna lie, I was quite full of myself when I saw how closely my article on hosting a website using nginx matched this video.

Satisfactory

After 218 hours I finally "beat" Satisfactory by completing the Space Elevator. While this goal was a great motivator for someone who had never played Satisfactory before, I have absolutely no interest in ever doing it again. The vast majority of the pieces you needed to build were only used to complete the Space Factory. On multiple occasions after I had completed a phase of the Space Elevator I demolished all buildings that had been necessary because it was simply easier to rebuild them when they were needed again.

All of that being said I still do want to start another game of Satisfactory. I just want the Space Elevator to be disabled and all alternative recipes unlocked so I can focus on building the biggest, most efficient, most kickass factory possible. Which segues into the next section very nicely...

Factorio

You may think that after playing 200+ hours of a factory simulation game I would want to take a break but the exact opposite occurred. I had taken my first hit and needed something more hardcore to keep the buzz going. Enter Factorio which is superior to Satisfactory in nearly every way. Really the only thing Satisfactory does better is force you into a first-person perspective which makes your factory feel that much more "real". In comparison Factorio is always from an isometric perspective and while you can walk your character around you quickly realize that managing everything remotely from the map view is so much better.

Also, while Satisfactory is more about exploring a singular world and building the necessary resources to do so, Factorio is the literal personification of "drill, baby, drill. Your goal is to strip mine whatever planet you find yourself on and then blast off into space to search for more environments to consume.

I've played about 72 hours so far and there is no end in sight.

Season two of The Pitt

We are eight episodes into season two of The Pitt and it is still amazing. Highly recommended for anyone who can stand a bit of medical gore, or at the very least watch it through their fingers.

Read Sunrise on the Reaping

I read Sunrise on the Reaping this month and it was a fine young adult book. It is definitely closer to the later end of The Hunger Games trilogy where it feels like we're mostly going through the motions. There is nothing special or unique in this book. We've read it all before but if you are looking for more Hunger Games content its probably going to be satisfying.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a solid puzzle game that is hamstrung by relying on randomness to extend gameplay. There is this pervasive idea in game development where you need to force the player to go through pain or else they cannot enjoy the outcome. The idea of allowing them to complete something and then layer on new levels of difficulty is anathema to these developers.

I will die on the hill that Blue Prince would be a better game if you were allowed to pick up to three items to start the day with in addition to manipulating the starting pool of rooms to draft from. This would undoubtedly ensure players "complete" the game quicker but this is a puzzle game for fucks sake! Once it has been beaten a certain way you should be enticing players to try something different. Require no items. Enforce absolute randomness of the rooms. Disable all permanent upgrades. Remove a certain resource. But as it stands with Blue Prince, once you luck out and beat the game the odds are you're going to be so drained from beating it that you're not going to want to go roll the dice dozens of more times to see if you can complete it a different way. Ironically, the worst thing to happen in this scenario wouldn't be that you don't complete the game a second time. It would be that you "luck out" and complete the game the same way again.

The fact that one of the achievements is "beat the game on your first try" and the only way to do this is to create a brand new save should have been a glaring red flag that the core of the game should be built around this. Instead you have YouTube videos of people "speed running" this achievement where, without fail, each and every one will say some variant of "I tried this 100 times but I just kept getting unlucky with the items". I do not know why game developer are so obsessed with wasting players time instead of prioritizing enjoyment.

Review February Goals

March Goals

#MonthlyRetrospective