status 2015 October

2015.10.01

Random Steam sale, Minerva's Den DLC for Bioshock 2 for $4.99. It reviews really well, and I liked Bioshock 2 well enough. And its short, so maybe I'll just play it now.

The Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 is also on sale for $3.99, also reviews really well. I'll take 'em both.

2015.10.11

So, Minerva's Den was scarcely a minor diversion.

I should note that I've been watching the Teens React: Gaming series for The Last of Us. For some reason their mix of reactions is compelling, even though its technically a lame playthrough. It comes out every couple of weeks, has been running for 8 months, and I guess has another month or so to go. I wonder if this game will ever be ported to PC, and if so, will it be a good enough port to care about.

I'm still looking up at the stars on clear nights and thinking about Mass Effect. Like poking a fire the next day and still finding coals glowing under the ash, my anger at the ending of ME3 is still there but going away slowly. All that work, all those carefully made decisions over three games, and the ending boils down to a simple A, B, C choice no matter how you got there.

I watch "ME3: Extended Cut Analysis + Leviathan DLC". Good conclusion that if that was the original ending, most of this controversy could have been avoided.

2015.10.12
It is remarkable that as I read various game sites and forums that Planescape is still coming up. Someday I might revisit the mods.

The weather is starting to get wintry. Soon it will be RPG time, specifically Fallout New Vegas.

2015.10.18
Checking in on Steam occasionally, I see some promotion for Grey Goo. Looks interesting, getting back to the roots of Starcraft and Command & Conquer. I've been increasingly disappointed in where Starcraft is going (action per minute, rock paper scissors, no walls or base defense etc.), and this looks hopeful.

A few things I've been thinking of the past few weeks, but haven't written:

I've been listening to the Retronauts podcast, and I just caught up to where they're talking about video game magazines. I have boxes of such old magazines in the attic, but haven't thought of them in a while, let alone looked at them. They didn't mention Dragon magazine, something I especially payed attention to when they mentioned a game.

I recent installed and showed World of Warcraft to someone. I kept telling myself that I'm not really playing this, I'm just demoing, then I'm moving on. Like an alcoholic wistfully spitting out the mouthwash, I uninstall and feel relieved. Not that the grapes are sour (or even fermentable), but what I saw wasn't all that intriguing. WoW is a riot of blocky colors, a place as noisy, crowded and empty as a shopping mall.

That got me thinking of why MMORPGs give me the shakes - my dormant mud addiction from the 90s. I wonder if I should post about Mystic Adventure here, or make its own mini-shrine. I'll probably just start another blog.

2015.10.24
Still slowly going through videogame withdrawal. I miss the light and the noise, Real Life is too slow, too quiet.
Thankfully, I don't have to decide anything right tonight, as Teens React: Gaming The Last of Us: Part 18 is out. These kids barely understand stealth play, listening, or inventory management, let alone searching every last pixel of the screen for resources. But they seem to be getting better.
Checking for any news of a PC port... no, and extremely unlikely for console exclusivity reasons. But you never know, Halo eventually got to PC.

2015.10.30
GTA V on sale for $40, something that rarely happens. So tempting, GTA would be perfect right now. Time to check video card requirements: 9800 minimum, GTX 660 recommended. Right now I'm using a GTX 460. I found a chart, and my card is right at the bottom, better would be a 780, or even better 970 or 980. My cpu and ram are OK.
What's the best card I can put in my aged Dell XPS 730x? A quick look and there is some trouble getting a 780 to to work. Looking at prices, it seems like around $300 at minimum, not including whatever extra I need to do for power.
I'm finally beginning to see the end for this computer for new games. But I have so many older games to play, I shouldn't run out any time soon.

Speaking of old games that won't stress my video card, there's a big Steam sale right now. Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines and Grim Fandango for $5 each, and there's a lot more single digit priced games to check out.

2015.10.31
Let's not give up so quickly - what does YouTube have to say on the video card question? I watch a video of someone running GTA V on a GTX 460 with 2GB VRAM, running at decent size display with at least normal settings. Frame rates are not high, but they are acceptable for driving, and that's what you need.

I grab a few other sale items, and a recent discovery, and its time to go back to San Andreas.

2015.11.27
Checking out the Steam sales, I check out the Saint Row series again. It looks like a mod of GTA from several versions ago, yet highly produced. As a completionist, I find it highly annoying that Steam starts with game two in the series, yet some reviewers say its actually good to start the series here. Also that the GOG version is better than the Steam version, checking GOG, there are many contradictions to this. Since this series looks about as silly as the Borderlands series, I'll probably continue to ignore them both.

status 2014 October

Finishing Planescape: Torment is a big milestone, maybe the biggest, and I'm glad its behind me.

Its time to review the past, and plan the next step. I read my way through this blog backwards all the way to the beginning, fixing the odd typo as I go. I leave a few typos because I'm reading on a pad and its too annoying to edit, and to leave something for the next read through.

I have so many more old games to knock off the bucket list, but I just don't feel like tackling long-obsolete UIs, pixelated art, or glitchy graphics just now. I go to YouTube and watch a compilation of Blizzard movies from Starcraft 2. Someone put them all into one vid; I'd put a link but it will probably just dissapear, and then get posted again anyway.

That was kind of interesting, so I start watching a new cinematic edit of The Last of Us, and as good as it is, and seemingly edited down, its still five hours, and not something I need to do again.

I find an Age of Empires 3 shortcut and click it, what could it hurt to take a quick look. Well, there goes two hours of staring at a screen. I don't need life's fast forward button right now. Uninstalled.

One of the things that struck me on the blog read through was how much time I wasted covering old ground, while there are exciting new worlds to visit. If there's a lesson in here somewhere, how about not wasting time?

status 2013 December

Nothing much going on.

Stopped playing Starcraft 2 a while ago.

Occasionally I still think about the story of The Last of Us.

Tried Plants vs Zombies 2, got bored, got sickened by the money grabbing 'pay to play' model, didn't go back.

Played a round of Left 4 Dead, just the first map No Mercy, got a little nostalgic, but mostly bored.

Paged through my nearly 500 Fallout 3 screenshots. Got a little more nostalgia, but mostly I'm glad to be done with it. I sure would like to crack open Fallout (3) New Vegas, but Real Life won't allow that level of commitment right now.

I've lost the plot, what was I supposed to be doing, playing from oldest to newest?

I read back through the blog, following my bread crumb trail, fixing typos. Sometimes in my daily life I think about some aspect of gaming I really should write down. I am relieved to see I have already written many of these things down, sometimes even more completely than I am thinking about them now. I've been wondering if all this blogging would ever amount to anything, and now I know it has, at least for my memory continuity.

status 2013 July

Since watching The Last of Us, I haven't done much. Mostly just plodding through Age of Empires 2, just so I can finish and be done with it.

Starcraft 2 expansion (Heart of the Swarm) went on sale, $10 off. Blizzard hardly ever has sales, until the product is years and years old, so I bought it. The reviews are not good. But its a Blizzard product - so I have to buy it! But I didn't buy Diablo 3, because of all the bad reviews, and I'm still not regretting that.

I better stick with the game plan though, of finishing off the oldest games first. At least, I better finish AOE2, or I never will.

---

Some weeks later, and I've chipped away at AOE2 for so long that its gone. It definitely made a pleasant diversion here and there, but it was starting to wear thin. I can say I'm well and truly done, except that they re-released the game in HD. I guess I'll check that out some day if it is on a good sale.

What do I do with the AOE2 Gold Edition box and cd? I think I'll start a new box called "SELL", and later when I have more downtime, I'll sell off all my retired games.

But now where do I go? Something recent, like Starcraft, which I've paid good money for and is just sitting there waiting for me on my hard drive, or keep on going through those old games?

BTW, I still think about The Last of Us sometimes. Its the sign of a good game, or at least the sign of a game with good hooks, that you're still thinking about it weeks and months later. And I didn't even play it, I just watched a playthrough. This is about as close as I've ever come to wanting to get a modern console, even though I know I would probably be endlessly annoyed by console issues.

The Last Of Us (2013)

I didn't plan on watching a playthrough of Last Of Us, I just fell into it and couldn't (didn't want to) get out. I normally avoid playthroughs unless I am forced to by technology or circumstance. Walkthroughs reek of spoilers and laziness, but sometimes you have to hold your nose and push through to salvage what you can of a gaming experience. The Last of Us is PS3 only, and will likely never be on PC, so normally I would just put it out of my mind, but the beautiful post-apocalyptic environment, and the non-traditional protagonists (all according to the box art, at least) kept calling to me.

Console games rarely make it to PC, and usually when they do, the conversion is so bad you wish they didn't bother. And by bad conversion, I mean little to no conversion at all; instead of adding depth to the controls and graphics, it will still feel like a clunky cartoonish console game. The Grand Theft Auto series provides examples and even some counter-examples of how to do this. So even if The Last of Us comes to Windows, it will be probably late and inadequate.

With this in mind it was easy to start watching a playthrough. First, I had to find one where the player would stop narrating. Most people are nowhere near as interesting as they think, and it ruins the playthrough to hear them babbling. A successful playthrougher must be a transparent layer between the viewer and the game. I watched the 52 part playthrough by "HassanAlHajry" over the course of a few weeks, and it felt like watching a mini-series on TV. And it stayed with me for days afterwards. It's been a month since I first started watching, and I'm still thinking about the ending.

*spoilers*

At first, it seems as if our hero is making a selfish decision at the end, but more layers develop as he carries it out. Whatever you might think of the ending, it is debatable why he did what he did, and why he thinks he did what he did. Also debatable are the consequences. I really hope they don't make a sequel here, because this is a really thought provoking place to stop the story.

After thinking about it a while now, most of the questions have collapsed into themselves, and the ending doesn't seem so controversial. First and foremost - was Joel acting selfishly, not wanting to sacrifice his surrogate daughter, humanity be damned? To some extent yes, but it doesn't matter. The Fireflies might have thought they were the good guys (everyone thinks they are the good guys), but they were hardly any different a force than any of the other savage tribes that only speak the language of violence (Hunters, Cannibals, Army), all of which Joel had to fight and defeat to survive.

OK, so the Fireflies are assholes, but that alone doesn't mean they need to be put down. Their crime is being idiots. This is foreshadowed early by one of their supposed scientists releasing test monkeys, getting bitten and infected, which forced the closing and evacuation of the their base. This is a big indicator that these people do not know what they're doing, and are fooling themselves that they are the scientists who can save humanity. And when they finally get their hands on the holy grail, an asymptomatic carrier, their first thought is to kill it and study the remains for an answer. Does this sound rational, or the least bit scientific? Killing your only only live specimen is the last possible test you try, if at all, and yet these idiots couldn't wait to jump into it. This might be their last chance to save humanity, and they were in a hurry even though there was no time pressure. I have little faith that these buffoons in lab coats would have discovered anything of value. Maybe some day Joel and Ellie will find some real scientists, and she can fulfill her destiny, and hopefully in a non-destructive way. Joel saved her from those hacks, so at least humanity still has a chance.

The ending seems almost deliberately muddled by the artificial crisis created by the Fireflies bloodthirstiness to kill the only known immune. If they had calmly and rationally explained to Joel and Ellie - which they probably would have had to do at gunpoint - they may have convinced them that this was for the best, and they might even have submitted to it. Of course, this might also have allowed Joel and Ellie to think for more than a minute and realize that there's plenty of work that can be done before anyone needs to die. The Fireflies seem to know they are doing something wrong, by their deliberate haste, and richly deserve the ass kicking that Joel dispenses. I can't decide if the ending is deliberately good writing or not, but its the ending we're stuck with. If only they had made the Fireflies plan seem more likely to succeed, they might have given the game that ambiguous moral ending. But the way they painted it, there is no ambiguous ending, which seems to sour the story with a little last minute incompetence, in what is otherwise a largely competent story.

Let me rephrase all that if it isn't clear - the game does NOT conclude with a morally ambiguous ending at all. The Fireflies were poor scientists at best, and the only right thing to do was not let them destroy what was humanities possible last hope. Joel was absolutely correct in killing them as much as necessary to save humanity's last hope, so at least there is some chance of trying again later. And yet the game seems to push the trappings of a morally ambiguous ending (the white lies, the self doubts, the unacknowledged acceptance of those white lies, etc.), which makes me doubt the authors knew what they were doing. What a wonderful mess.

It's easy to dismiss all that, because the game leaves you with some deep emotional impressions, that last quite a while. The atmosphere, the characters, the world, it adds up to a powerful whole, and nothing more needs to be said.

I hope they don't make a sequel.