(Jou Ma Se) Banana Bread

If you don’t understand Afrikaans (a language from South Africa where I live), the title in English is Your Mother’s Banana Bread, though it is actually an old recipe from my mother. Anyways, this is an excellent recipe that I make regularly and tastes really good. Note, I have adapted this recipe to use less bowls & reduce cleaning time, in the original recipe bananas are mashed in 1 bowl, dry ingredients sieved in another bowl & eggs whisked in the 3rd bowl. I don’t notice any difference using my method.

(Mostly) Instrumental Guitar Bands Worth a Listen

So, growing up I listened to a lot of metal and played guitar, I still play guitar though some of the music I used to listen to I have outgrown over the years. I therefore sought out similar, though more mature options for listening and stumbled upon (mostly) instrumental bands. Here is a list of some of my favourites that are, in my opinion, worth listening to if you like metal, hard rock, doom and/or stoner (which I also used to be) music. Apparently the genre(s) are referred to as post-metal or post-rock with some psychedelic, progressive and stoner/sludge/doom metal in the list as well. All of these bands/artists were previously unknown to me up until a year or two ago and possibly to you the reader as well. If you like any of these genres of music or play guitar or like predominantly guitar based music then there is probably something on this list that you might enjoy listening to.

Deck Builder Game Template…

I always wanted to make a deck building game and did start coding one, however the grind of adding all the content got the better of me and I gave up. Therefore, if anyone is interested, there is an almost complete template available on GitHub using Go and Raylib with enemies, cards and a map.

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.CSV format on load not working?

This is something I find really annoying and finally worked out the reason that this happens. You open a .CSV in Microsoft Excel and it does not autodetect the columns and format the data. This is actually an easy fix and relates to the regional formatting settings for numbers (see image below). To get Microsoft Excel to automatically format .CSV data on import use these steps on Windows and hopefuly it should work. Note I run Windows 10 (not 11) so there may be some slight differences in the appearance however the fix should still work regardless of what version of Windows you are using.

Are you copying me?

So, for anyone that has played Risk of Rain 2 (an excellent game if you haven’t played it) then Gatekeeper Gatekeeper will seem immediately familiar. Whilst visually the game is not that similar to Risk of Rain 2, in terms of the gameplay there are a huge number of similarities, though this it not a bad thing.

Gatekeeper is a rogue-like, third person (isometric) shooter, the gameplay is fairly straightforward, you start a level with a certain task to complete, once complete the level boss will spawn, you kill the boss and then move onto the next level. In between levels you can upgrade your character and unlock items for future runs. There are a lot of items and a lot of interesting combinations that you can employ to make your character more powerful. There are also a number of different characters to unlock with different gameplay styles. Each character has a number of different skills which recharge at different rates after use and these skills can be upgraded along the way as can other things such as movement speed, attack speed and base damage.

Older doesn’t mean bad

These days, often when people are buying a new game (more especially those with a shiny new RTX graphics card) they will stampede to the newest AAA game (new game with a big budget from a big game studio) and buy it because ‘it’s new, has better graphics and is therefore a better game’. If you applied the same principle to buying a car, you could (often, though not always) give a broken down car that hardly runs a fresh coat of paint and new interior and then sell it as the ’latest and greatest’ thing since the last ’latest and greatest’ thing (which was probably a few months ago). If a game is bad, amazing new 2025 (or whatever year it is that you are reading this) graphics with multi-sampled ray tracing (or whatever the latest trend is to sell graphics cards) will not make the game good, just more expensive.

A winding stem for a climbing plant?

Apart from the name, which seems to have little relation to the game itself, Tendryll is a game to buy or put on your wishlist right now if you are a fan of games like Slay the Spire, Inscryption and/or Into the Breach. Whilst still in early access (and only version 0.41), at time of writing there is a lot of content in the game already and it is totally playable and definitely worth the money.

Guns, Ants & Platforms…

Not really a huge fan of platform games though really enjoy roguelite/roguelike games and therefore decided to give Ants Took My Eyeball a chance and was pleasantly surprised how good it is. There aren’t a lot of rogueish platformer games out there (Dead Cells is about the only one that springs to mind and is more of a metroidvania/roguelike mashup) so there are not a lot games to compare it to, though it does stand out as one of the more polished 2D platformer games I have ever played.

Like chess with ninjas++

It’s not actually that much like chess in many ways, and quite a lot like chess in many others, though either way it’s damn good and it’s Shogun Showdown (also on Nintendo Switch and Playstation. ‘Don’t just move, think first’ is perhaps the most concise summary of the gameplay, this is a game of strategy, thinking at least 1 or 2 moves ahead all the time. Looking at gameplay videos you might be put off by the simplicity, thinking it looks too easy and not worth the money. At first glance, it does look like a straightforward game where you are a ninja and move backwards and forwards and kill enemies using weapons. However, the variety of upgrades and the combinations in which they can be used to execute combos makes it addictive, fun and definitely recommended. Even better, there is a free demo version available on all plaforms so you can try before you buy.

A roguelite on steroids++

When you think roguelite/roguelike you might think, ’lots of things to unlock, maybe 50 to 100 and I am a happy gamer’. Doomsday Hunters (also on Nintendo Switch) takes this idea and runs with it, and runs with it and then runs with it again. 50+ hours into the game and I am still unlocking items, characters and game modes, with no end in sight. Playing it, grinding to unlock is not a chore and it has been a lot of fun the entire time.