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Time well spent doing nothing productive
Jun. 24th, 2007 12:22 pmI've been playing a lot of Odin Sphere. Once you crest the surprisingly steep learning curve, the game features a sublime consistency of difficulty, enough to keep me feeling challenged but rarely frustrated. It's a time sink, but I can't feel too bad about it because it's hard, a real workout for certain digital game skills that haven't really been stressed in a while. Great fun, and the opposite of brain-dead level grinding.
Fortunately for me and the rest of my life, the game's structure gives it plenty of discrete break-points. It takes an hour to get through each "chapter", of which there seem to be 40 or so. After each one, capped by a big boss battle and then a delightfully melodramatic cutscene, I feel done, and I can walk away for a day or so. This is important.
Yesterday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
classicaljunkie and I went to dougo's housewarming, way out in Bellerica. Ate a lot, and played a lot of games:
* Crokinole withkarlvonl I won 5 points in the first round! And then proceeded to give up like 500, but whatevs.
* CJ's copy of Toppo, a turnless pattern-matching game which I enjoy, even though I usually get pounded flat at it (and yesterday was no exception).
* Tekeli-li, a Japanese-produced, Lovecraft-themed trick-taking game that I actually rather enjoyed. I figured out the strategy about halfway through and went from fourth to second place, so I feel like I won. I may add this one to my wishlist.
* Hunting Party, whichdougo called "Clue: The Gathering", and that isn't too far off. It's a cute game, though hurt by its bizarre production values; the rulebook is really slick and expensive-looking, for example, while most of the game's copious artwork is amateurish. I spent much of the game meditating upon a badly drawn piece of ham.
This was the only game I won outright. The front cover art looks like the hotel lobby during Arisia.
* Vegas Showdown, of which I'd heard much in the last couple of years but never seen. I liked it, though I didn't get the hang of balancing all the different turn options, and came in dead last of a wide point spread. I think its bidding mechanic also led me to fail. I don't bother to compute how much something is worth to me, and so use no sense except gut feeling about how high to go. Surely I end up spending too much on things.
Game became memorable whendictator555 executed the most egregious fuck-you maneuver I'd ever seen from her, which was pretty awesome, even if was aimed at me. (Basically she outbid me for something I really needed to salvage my score at the very end, and then instead of deploying it she ripped it up in front of me while her cronies all smoked cigars and laughed.) I'd have done the same to her in a heartbeat, mind. Now I will have to do it twice.
Fortunately for me and the rest of my life, the game's structure gives it plenty of discrete break-points. It takes an hour to get through each "chapter", of which there seem to be 40 or so. After each one, capped by a big boss battle and then a delightfully melodramatic cutscene, I feel done, and I can walk away for a day or so. This is important.
Yesterday
classicaljunkie and I went to dougo's housewarming, way out in Bellerica. Ate a lot, and played a lot of games:* Crokinole with
karlvonl I won 5 points in the first round! And then proceeded to give up like 500, but whatevs.* CJ's copy of Toppo, a turnless pattern-matching game which I enjoy, even though I usually get pounded flat at it (and yesterday was no exception).
* Tekeli-li, a Japanese-produced, Lovecraft-themed trick-taking game that I actually rather enjoyed. I figured out the strategy about halfway through and went from fourth to second place, so I feel like I won. I may add this one to my wishlist.
* Hunting Party, which
dougo called "Clue: The Gathering", and that isn't too far off. It's a cute game, though hurt by its bizarre production values; the rulebook is really slick and expensive-looking, for example, while most of the game's copious artwork is amateurish. I spent much of the game meditating upon a badly drawn piece of ham.This was the only game I won outright. The front cover art looks like the hotel lobby during Arisia.
* Vegas Showdown, of which I'd heard much in the last couple of years but never seen. I liked it, though I didn't get the hang of balancing all the different turn options, and came in dead last of a wide point spread. I think its bidding mechanic also led me to fail. I don't bother to compute how much something is worth to me, and so use no sense except gut feeling about how high to go. Surely I end up spending too much on things.
Game became memorable when
dictator555 executed the most egregious fuck-you maneuver I'd ever seen from her, which was pretty awesome, even if was aimed at me. (Basically she outbid me for something I really needed to salvage my score at the very end, and then instead of deploying it she ripped it up in front of me while her cronies all smoked cigars and laughed.) I'd have done the same to her in a heartbeat, mind. Now I will have to do it twice.