Oh right, yesterday was my 48th birthday.
Didn’t do anything to celebrate it besides buying a crazy huge bundle of fairly high rated games via Humble Bundle.
20 decent games for $30 and the proceeds go to help Covid research.
That’s $1.50 a game. Not bad.
First one was Into the Breach, which is a turn based military strategy game. Likelihood of continued play is low. I like turned based strategy but I’m not in the mood for it.
Next was Baba Is You, an incredibly original and fun puzzle game where manipulating the rules of the game is part of the game. Replay potential 100 percent. I got stuck after the first few puzzles and had to look for hints because the puzzles involve the sort of nonlinear thinking I have always struggled with, but the game is so dang fun that there is no chance I am going to give up on it.
Bioshock Remastered came next. An updated version of a classic story-rich FPS from long ago. I tried the original long ago but didn’t care for it. But this time I am determined to learn to enjoy the thing because so many people rave about it.
So far, the game is unusual and very chaotic. I can see why it turned me off before. Lots of noise and strange lighting and alarms going off.
But also a lot of brilliant atmospheric touches and one heck of a setting. So, I will push myself through the game some more and see if things get a little less crazy eventually.
And then came, believe it or not, Euro Truck Simulator 2. Not a game I would have chosen like EVER but it was included in the bundle so I thought what the hell, I will give it a shot.
Unsurprisingly, it was not for me. Couldn’t even get out of the parking lot.
Next was Hyper Light Drifter, a somewhat 80’s inspired adventure game with 16-bit graphics and a “crashed on an alien planet” storyline.
So far I am iffy on it. It has a lot of potential and excellent music (very space-y and synth-y) , but on the whole it does not really engage me.
Left me cold, to be honest.
I will probably give it another chance to grab me.
Then came The Witness. First person perspective, 3D world, puzzles to solve strewn about various places. Not really my cuppa. Baba Is You has more of my kind of puzzle.
There’s even a verbal component.
Finally in the series of the ones I have actually installed and tried comes This War Of Mine, a war game about surviving as a group of civilians.
An interesting approach. But it has zero tutorial and expects me to control three characters all at once and combined with the understandably bleak setting I am pretty sure I won’t play it much.
Those are my impressions so far. Right now I have Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, an update of a game from 2001, downloading.
It looks promising. I am hoping it’s like Baldur’s Gate or similar. I have enjoyed the heck out of games of that genre when the writing is good and the system is OK.
Woops, forgot to talk about my birthday.
Oh well, like anyone gives a shit.
More after the break.
I’m 48 and I don’t care
Sung to the tune of Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song”.
Part of me – the part that has not yet yielded to bitterness and cynicism – wants me to have been all “yay me!” about my birthday, but meh.
I guess it’s true what they say : the older you get, the less they mean to you,
I mean, it’s hard to get excited about your birthday when you don’t even get cake.
Well, I suppose I could have baked one myself, with Splenda. Been meaning to get back into baking for myself. It would give me something more active to do than play video games and it would save me money on sugar free desserts while allowing me to have a much greater variety of dessert choices.
Plus, cakes are easy.
The main stumbling block is that damned oven. It has this fun quirk where it lets me preheat it and put something in to bake…. but this time the heat doesn’t come back on.
And the only way to get it to come back on is to thump the stovetop real hard until you hear it click.
And that’s pretty stressful. I get pretty emotional when I cook and that doesn’t help.
It presumably could be fixed. I assume there’s just something wrong with the little switch that turns the heat off when the oven door is open.
How hard could that be to replace?
Oh, and speaking of video games, I’ve tried Titan Quest now and I love it. It’s a Diablo-type ARPG and it’s set in an ancient Greece where all of the Greek mythology is true.
Yes, that means that the Titan in the title refers to the actual Titans, the ones that Zeus and his children slew.
I’m as surprised as you are.
In this version of events, Zeus merely “banished” the Titans, because otherwise they would not be around to be villains.
And that bugged me a little but whatever.
But now they made a villain out of Nessus the centaur, a being so heroic he got made into a goddamned constellation!
Oh, and apparently satyrs are evil now. Satyrs! Happy horny humpy satyrs who do nothing but hump nymphs and fauns and each other all day!
Sigh. Oh well, still a kickass game.
Plus I tried an absolutely nutzoid game called Superhot where the gimmick is that it’s an FPS where time only moves when you move.
The result is kind of like being inside a slow-motion replay of an action scene. In many ways, it’s more like a puzzle than a shootout.
That said, it’s kinda fun. I’ve always wondered if it would be fun to have all the time I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do, then do it, and the answer is yes!
And I still have ten more games to go!
I bought myself one heck of a fun present.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,