I finished reading the second Dune Trilogy book, Dune Messiah, in Portuguese. Compared to book one, this was way harder to read and, sometimes, even hard to follow along, at least for me. The story wasn’t so captivating, so I crawled through the book, not being able to actually and properly enjoy it the way I wanted. As I bought the three first books, I started Children of Dune right away (if going through the first screens in an ebook can be considered “starting"). I’m yet not sure I’ll read it right away, though, as I feel my mind could probably use some rest from the Dune universe right now… we’ll see.

After almost 34 hours of gameplay, I can happily say I beat my first Balatro run. And it made me feel so happy I even posted the winning screenshot to my Mastodon profile! Yesssss!

While I played and relentlessly tried to achieve this feat, I gathered a lot of tips from Reddit discussions, Steam threads and even YouTube videos, but I have to be honest. I’m not sure there was a definite “winning strategy” I followed, except for trying to maximize multipliers and chips. In the end there came a blind after which I just felt I was going to win.

I guess finally winning a run also had a great part of luck involved. I mean, despite the almost 34 hours it took me to achieve that, I had played 27 of these last week, meaning that I only added another 7 hours of effort to the pile, as I almost didn’t find the time to play this week. So, I believe I’d have eventually beaten the game sooner or later. Of course, beating it was fantastic, but playing it, regardless of beating the runs or not, remains lots of fun for me.

Speaking of games, I needed to play (way more than a) couple of hours of “Slice & Dice” this week. I bought it about one year ago at itch.io for exact $7, and I didn’t regret it even for a minute. Now, the thing is once I learned it came out on Android, on Steam and on iOS only 3 days ago, I thought it would be nice to support the developer once again — well, actually twice, as I’ve bought myself the Steam and iOS versions.

“Slice & Dice” is another roguelike game (well, I do mean it when I say roguelikes are my favorite game genre). But unlike Balatro, which is a deck builder, “Slice & Dice” is a turn-based tactics game where we control 5 heroes, each represented by a different, unique dice. There are too many game modes to talk about, but in the standard one you basically take your party through 20 rounds, each with different foes to beat.

This game is awesome. Besides its cool 3D dice physics, there are 128 hero classes to choose from or to develop characters into (dev says it can come up to 99999+), 73 monsters to fight, 473 items to modify dice and gameplay, and lots of fun. The iOS version, the only one I’ve been able to play so far, is very loyal to the original version, and kept me glued to the screen for longer than I should have been… 😅

Tomorrow another week starts. As it’s Sunday, I might release my new site version to the public (the one I’ve been building with Soupault). If I really do it, I’ll post news to Mastodon, as it’ll be nice to get some feedback from you guys. Meanwhile, I need to say, once again, how happy I’ve been feeling with the sensation of manually building everything up. 😊