• Guild Wars “Reforged Mode” Alpha Update

    Guild Wars “Reforged Mode” Alpha Update

    Whoa – I was just done writing about the initial Guild Wars Reforged update and suddenly there’s new content?

    Reforged Mode Alpha was released for new characters, which gives a gold and experience bonus in the Prophecies campaign, revises henchmen skillbars (NPC group members), and makes some notable changes to pre-Searing Ascalon, the tutorial of Prophecies, of all places. Read more below if you don’t know why that’s interesting, because it is!

    (more…)
  • Guild Wars Reforged: Free Update and a Blast From the Past

    Guild Wars Reforged: Free Update and a Blast From the Past

    Note: Just before releasing this post, an additional update with a more changes and an Alpha for “Reforged mode” was released, which absolutely warrants an extra post – so see this as a part one of (at least) two. Read the follow-up here: Guild Wars “Reforged Mode” Alpha Update

    One thing I certainly didn’t expect to do with the blog was writing about the original Guild Wars from 2005. But on December 3rd, there was an update, called Guild Wars Reforged, which is on Steam and available for everyone who already has a Guild Wars account. It adds controller and Steam Deck support alongside HD textures, high DPI support, some visual and audio upgrades, as well as a few bug fixes and a promise of more to come.

    (more…)
  • Breaking the Silence After Six Years

    So, it’s been quite a while since I posted anything at all, hasn’t it?

    There are multiple drafts for reviews of Microsoft Flight Simulator I never finalized, COVID shut down the world, Animal Crossing was my most played game for two years, I bought a motorcycle, MSFS 2024 released… And a lot of other stuff has happened, too. Somewhere in between all this, the site moved to a new server and the theme broke. Some things in my life really took me far, far away from both flight simulation and especially this blog.

    I’d occasionally start writing up an idea, and even thought about taking the blog in a different direction, maybe tech-focused, or just about what’s going on in my life, like traveling or whatever. Ultimately, none of these ideas went anywhere – and here we are, on a dead site that, somehow, generates thousands of views every month. Realistically, most of these page visits are likely bots or “AI” content scrapers, but it still stings to know that I have some sort of online presence, something I always dreamed of when I was younger.

    So… Where does this leave us? I have no idea as of now. Maybe I can manage to take this site in a slightly different direction after all. I’m flying sailplanes in real life again, which brought a refreshed flight simulation interest with it. Aerofly FS 4 and Condor 3 came out, and I haven’t even tried the latter of these two. I started to use Linux as my daily use desktop OS and learned many things about it. Baldur’s Gate 3 consumed nearly 400 hours of my life so far, and it’s threatening to take even more. I traveled to beautiful places around the world, learned tasty new recipes, soldered new capacitors on an old Macintosh LC II mainboard, and so many other things. Maybe – just maybe – some of these stories are worth sharing with you, whoever you are, dear internet stranger.

    Before I publish any new posts, I think I desperately want a dark theme for this site. Maybe I’ll start there, do some re-branding, and clean up a few old posts and stuff while I’m at it. See what I can do about cookie banners and move to unintrusive stat tracking, away from Google. Then I can maybe start to write up some small but interesting posts.

    We’ll see where it goes from there.

    Thank you for reading my ramblings.
    – Matt

  • Microsoft Flight Simulator Announced – Release Planned for 2020

    Microsoft Flight Simulator Announced – Release Planned for 2020

    Believe it or not, I didn’t follow anything related to E3. But it didn’t matter, as the trailer for the just announced Microsoft Flight Simulator still made it’s way into my feed.

    Source: youtube.com

    It almost looks too good to be true. They say it’s in-engine footage, I almost don’t buy it. However, technology has come so far, it just might be! Either way, it got me hyped up for what might be possible. Thinking about it, it almost looks like they put airplanes in a Forza trailer, doesn’t it?

    (more…)
  • Condor 2 Review: Thorough and Detailed

    Condor 2 Review: Thorough and Detailed

    I told you I was going to actually review Condor 2 (Homepage) at some point, just give it some time. And here it finally is. I present to you, in a more or less readable form, my thoughts on Condor 2. Enjoy!

    (more…)