Decided to give another game from my Steam wishlist a try today : this one
It’s called Torment : Tides of Numenera, and it’s an isometric turn based RPG like the Pillars of Eternity and Baldur’s Gate series’ .
I’ve played it for 97 minutes so far, That means I technically have 23 more minutes of play time to make up my mind about whether or not I am going to keep it.
I want to want to keep it. I am growing tired of all this buying and returning of games. And I have the sneaking suspicion that I am just being incredibly fussy and that if I don’t just pick something and stick with it, I will still be flitting about come Xmas.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I am not really enjoying the game, and I think I know why. It’s the same reason I could not get into the game’s spiritual precursor, the much lauded Placescape : Torment.
The games are just too damned weird.
It pain my pride to admit it, but there’s just too much novelty thrown at me at once. The games are so breathtakingly original that it wears me out. And once I reach that point, I lose interest in the game.
It’s just too much work.
The brand new ideas, concepts, game mechanics, and damned near everything else come too thick and too fast for me. In fact, I get the same feeling of being utterly overwhelmed that I got in that linguistics course I took all those years ago.
And the same headache I used to get from programming class.
And that’s not what I want in a game. I suppose that if I had played a ton of that kind of RPG, I might not find it all so novel and stressful.
But I haven’t. So I do.
Also, the game has just screen after screen after screen of dialog and expositional text. I had to wade through like a hundred screens of it just to get to character creation. After that, it was clear that the game was going to mostly be gigantic wads of text broken up by the occasional battle.
Oh, and of course, the battle system and the character stats have to all be new and weird and counterintuitive too.
So here I go, requesting yet another refund.
I want a refund for Darksiders “Not 4” Genesis, too, but it’s way too late for that.
I am pissed off because I am stuck at this brutally difficult boss fight that pits me against a bastard called the Houndmaster whose hellhounds attack me from all angles at once while he attacks me with sword strokes so powerful they can kill me in seconds.
And that wouldn’t be so bad, except that I can’t go back to where I was – that gate closed behind me – and because the game keeps only one save, I can’t go back to a previous save either.
And to top it all off, I am only in this mess because the game glitched in such a way that a certain gate just plain did not open and that meant I couldn’t go forward the normal main plot kind of way, and I was forced to look for an alternate route.
And there’s no way to turn down the difficulty of the game and apparently absolutely no cheats out there for it, so I can’t fix my game that way either.
So I am pretty pissed off at the game right now because my only options are to either somehow win the impossible boss fight, or start all over again.
Or uninstall the game and try to forget about it till I am over being pissed off at it and starting over doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
None of those are good options.
But they are the only ones I have.
More after the break.
The Bonfire of the Insanities
I am damned proud of that title.
Anyhow, I am still fairly depressed. The theory that this is about sleep seems more insubstantial by the moment.
I mean, maybe I am still behind on sleep. But there is something more going on.
So I figure I’m in one of my burn periods, where my mind is burning all the leftover bullshit in my mind left behind when I have healed a portion of my mental damage.
And while that is happening, my mind is cloudy from the smoke and it’s hard to think clearly plus the heat from the fire gives me a headache and makes me feel cranky and irritable and out of sorts.
And I just bought a big bag of sorts last week. Where’d they all go?
This too shall pass. At some point, the fire will have used up all its fuel and petered out, and I will actually feel pretty good for a while.
You know. Cleansed.
In the meantime, I will maintain my same wearily indulgent attitude toward the depression. I will listen to what it says but I will not do what it wants, or let it rule me when it is a known liar and cheater and therefore nothing it says has any real value.
So I listen because, as inn behaved as it is, it is still part of me that is trying to tell me something and I want to hear that something, both for its own sake, and because hopefully once heard it will calm down and leave me alone.
But it’s not going to get anywhere near the driver’s seat. And I am not going to listen to what it says about what other people think of me because on that subject, it is demonstrably completely insane.
So I am going to hang in there and let the healthy parts of me take over and do what that part of me wants for a change.
It knows best what it needs to do in order to heal.
I just need to start listening to it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.