Almost Retro - unclau.de goes back in (gaming) history

I listen to a bunch of different gaming podcasts and quite a few of them are centered around retro gaming. There seems to be some consensus that retro means “at least 20 years old”. I have been wanting to create more gaming related content, but I do not want to be one of a million voices talking about current gaming trends and I do not want to compete with any of the retro-gamers I follow (and often support financially).

unclau.de now supports Dark Mode

If you are like me and you have told your OS and/or browser that you prefer dark mode, you should be reading this here as light colored text on a dark background.

The theme I picked when I started this website did not support this out of the box, so I had to add it. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything. If I did and some content is now hard(er) to read, please let me know.

Overlooting - First Impressions

About two weeks ago, on the first days of January 2026, I started playing Overlooting by Posing Possums. The developer calls the game a inventory management roguelite and if you are familiar with these terms, that pretty much says it all.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pretty straight forward. You control a single character that has to fight thru a series of areas grouped into 3 regions. In most areas you will face 1-3 enemies. Combat is turn-based and while there are 2 damage types - physical and magic - there is only one way to directly attack. A few potions exists, these can be used “out of turn” and most of them apply status effects, but one does direct damage to an enemy. Using potions does not count as an attack, meaning it does not trigger “when attacked” effects like Thorns or counterattack (de)buffs.

Personal homepage/blog, attempt umpteen and a half

Yesterday I was silly enough to try a kernel update on a ionos (US) hosted cloud server - without any backups, at 2 in the morning. As one might imagine, it did not go well and the server was dead.

On the positive side, there was not much in it and while looking thru the ionos admin panel to see what my options were for bringing it back online, ideally with an OS newer than Ubuntu 18.04 (/yes/) I noticed that I had reached the end of whatever promotion my contract was own. Paying $32 for a mostly unused server while I was on a US software engineering salary was one thing, paying $80 now that I am on a German salary is a whole other, so I cancelled the contract. The domains I had as part of the contract had lost all meaning to me, so I am not even sad I can’t move them over to DomainFactory to use later.