Breweries and Games!

Our adventure in Ballard continues!  This week we returned to the densest collection of breweries in the city. We sat down at Stoup brewing, and found we didn't want to get up.  Flagship: multiple Dogs: yes Kids: yes Do they brew there: yes Food: food trucks and a meat vending machine Has guest taps: no Events: yes Outside seating: large beer garden I had heard about Stoup long before I started this blog. I'd seen their stickers around, heard them listed in the same breath as other Ballard breweries, even had a pint of their beer at a party. I hadn't been there though.  As I approach Stoup I hear even more about it. Perhaps it's also because of the great weather finally returning to Seattle, but I can hear that the brewery is packed from a distance. I drew nearer and the shapes of patrons with pints, outdoor chairs, and a food truck came into view.  There's a casual feel to the place, something that's hard to do with as many pe...

When it comes to video games I love sequels. While it's difficult to capture the 'magic' of an experience from a film in a sequel, a video game sequel has the addition of mechanics to work with. Either they can improve or tighten the good mechanics of the original or completely rework them when they were bad on the original.  So I generally like sequels, but they necessitate a comparison to the original. This can make them hard to review.  Halo Wars 2 is a sequel that is hard to review for this reason. I find that most of my comments are in relation to the first game. This is unavoidable perhaps, but it's unfair to those of you who didn't play the other one.  Which is a shame because the first Halo Wars was quite good. A rare RTS title that worked on consoles it did exactly what you would expect from it. It put you in command of the human and alien forces from the other Halo games. Like the main Halo games it had a campaign and a multiplayer which I p...