Are You Game?

I was in it to the end. There was quipa point for me.

Arahant (View Comment):

I was in it to the end. There was quipa point for me.

Queepa, if memory serves, and thank you. I did forget to mention Half-Life, hence the graphic (for once mine, not the peerless EJ, so forgive the crudeness)

I think I stopped most of those games after Myst. I kept with a Linux-based version of Civilization called FreeCiv and a computer pinball game. Then I play Solitaire while listening to podcasts or Youtube videos. (What do you mean there's video on those things? Nothing worse than when has to watch something to know what is going on.) I also have a few others, such as Sudoku, generally do two puzzles per day.

But these shoot 'em up types? No, never did those. Now, The Bard's Tale, that was as close as I came back in the Apple ][ e and Commodore 64 days. Then there were the text-based ones where one would explore a castle. You described something like that.

I think it may mean that we're old, James. But I gave up on gaming earlier than you did. For one thing, I don't want to compete against anyone other than myself. I'm not sure if that's being old or introverted or misanthropic. But I'll sit here and play my one-person games and write my books and molder away with a purring cat beside me. Carry on, James, for as long as you can.

Arahant (View Comment):

I think it may mean that we’re old, James. But I gave up on gaming earlier than you did. For one thing, I don’t want to compete against anyone other than myself. I’m not sure if that’s being old or introverted or misanthropic. But I’ll sit here and play my one-person games and write my books and molder away with a purring cat beside me. Carry on, James, for as long as you can.

Or as long as I wish, perhaps. I never did get into multi-player games. It's a younger man's sport. (Note: is not actually a sport.) I understand the appeal, though. Talking smack with your buddies, sneaking around corners in ruined urban environments, figuring out tricky ways to dispatch the enemy - very much a guy thing. It's a pity it is atomized and isolated by definition, though.

I hit the Queepa point in Myst with that stupid rocket ship. I had the puzzle solved, in that I knew what I needed to do with it, but it required me distinguishing tones which I personally wasn't equipped to do. There's a cheaty way to solve it where instead of getting the sound right you count up from the bottom, but having screwed that up too I decided the remainder of the game wasn't worth it.

I didn't get far in Riven. I get that some folks like banging their heads against impossible crossword puzzles, but it seems video games have gone further in the 'mindless entertainment' direction. I'm fine with that.

On the "too old for this" scale, I dislike the modern trend towards souls-likes. Those games tend to have frequent boss fights where you're supposed to memorize the boss's attacks, figure out the timings, and twitch react quick enough to dodge while still chipping in damage. Absolutely none of which looks like a good time to me.

Half-life was a heck of a game. It's a rough equivalent to Citizen Kane, in that it's very hard for modern folks to go back and see what was so amazing about it because all the technical innovations have been copied into the standard playbook now. I remember the first time I saw it, where he reloaded the shotgun and instead of dropping the weapon off screen and returning it fully loaded, you could see the characters actual hands sticking actual shells into the gun. It took longer to reload because you had to physically spend more time reloading it. Amazing.