Well, this is awkward.

For the first time since I started this Sunday silly foob thing, I have no silly fun inconsequential links just hanging around in my browser just waiting to be branded with the big foobling iron and released into the world to amuse and entertain the masses.

(You know who you are. )

Instead, all I have is depressing and serious stuff, and not a lot of that. I guess the days in the aftermath of a mass shooting while the fate of the world’s most powerful nation (and if the giant dies, we die too) hangs in the balance because ideological lunatics can’t accept the reality that when you run up a huge bill on your credit card, the payments have to go up some….. I guess these are not days that produce a lot of fun fun stuff.

So what the hell, fuck all that stuff, I will just talk about my so-called “so-called” life.

Let’s see…. oh, Maple Story got over their “unscheduled maintenance” period (someone finally beat the flames out with their Macbook, I guess) and so I have finally gotten a chance to try the darn thing.

My impressions so far : the art is, indeed, cute, and the game seems to be done with a good sense of humour, fun, and colorful imagination. My character can summon up a robo-mech suit twice his size and go clomping about gunning down baddies with a gatling gun or smunching them with big robotic fists right from the get-go, and that is a lot of fun. And there are a lot of characters with amusing lines around, and it is, of course, a simply huge game world with tons of places to explore. So that is all for the good.

But the learning curve is kind of rough. I keep ending up places and having absolutely no idea how to get back where I came from. This is a serious violation of the Two Way Door Rule, which, being someone who is not that great at finding their way around in video games in the first place, is one which is near and dear to my heart. If I go through a door in a video game, I should find myself standing in front of an identical door in the new room that leads right back to where I just came from, almost every time.

This is especially true in a 2D environment where the only thing linking rooms to each other is said doors (as oppose to a 3D environment where you can have open archways, corridors, landmarks, and other things that let one area flow more naturally into each other) and so it is vitally important to keep all these doors (portals, teleporters, whatever) in some kind of sensible relationship to one another.

And despite the game helping you in a lot of other ways, there does not seem to be a facility for telling you how to get from point A to point B, which is especially frustrating when you are trying to complete a quest.

Also, honestly, a lot of the gameplay seems to be “go to this room of a few ladders and platforms and defeat a set number of identical monsters” variety, and that is getting pretty boring. So unless the game perks up some, I doubt it will keep my interest.

What is it with these online games and not explaining anything? Is the common received wisdom that “people have more fun figuring things out themselves”?

Because I am not one of those people.

Leaving video games, we will turn the discussion, instead, to video games. On the Wii, I am still (!) playing Monster Hunter Tri after four months.

I really wish I had just bought the damn game. Then I would be incredibly pleased with myself for the massive amount of gameplay I got for my investment, instead of kicking myself in the ass for having my first ‘rental’ from these fine folks be apparently the hardest game I would ever be hopelessly addicted to, ever.

I know I shouldn’t be beating myself up for not beating the game yet. It’s a monthly plan, after all, so even if I had beaten the game a week after getting it, it would still have cost me the same amount of money.

They just would have sent me different games from the list by now.

But still, I am not used to one game taking this long to defeat. Usually, by now, I would have long since either beaten or abandoned a game.

But every time I think “screw this, I am going to just return this game and they can send me the next one from my list”, another part of my brain says “but what if we tried this?” and then I am back, playing the darn thing.

I often wish I had never seen the thing.

Being an older gamer is complex.

That’s it for now. Later folks!