Precious

[prog]

The new thing I say when a video game ceases to be fun, by making me do something I already did over and over, is: This is not treating my time and attention as precious.

Why, yes, I did just finally get to the Meat Circus stage in Psychonauts...!

While I'm here: any game recs I need to know about? Know ye that I really really want to play Dwarf Fortress, but ffs, I cannot get past the interface. I just can't do it. It's like trying to read a really smashing novel where all the text on every page is encoded as a stereogram. And covered in bees. I don't know.

What are you playing?

Comments

[gen.livejournal.com]

Gametap, wonderful game download and playing service. As for which games...

PuzzleQuest, Stand 'O Food, Overlord, Oregon Trail, Just finished Planescape: Torment. Thinking of picking up Fallout.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Puzzle Quest was a hit last year in the house. I lurved Fallout 2 a few years ago, but sadly it's on my list of got-to-the-endgame-and-will-never-quite-finish games.

Oregon Trail? As in "You just shot 6,183,629,291 pounds of food! Too bad about the dysentery!" ?

I'll check out those other ones!

[gen.livejournal.com]

Yep, that Oregon trail. My goal is to have a completely vegetarian wagon train :) Maybe I'll send them out too late in the year so they get trapped in the Rockies during winter... MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

"Gen, why did you name your party 'breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert?'"

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Wesnoth. On and off, mostly on. Debating trying to break into the resource files and create new races/etc.

Dwarf Fortress, on and off. I invested the time for the interface (both the inputs, which are predicated on a number keypad I don't have, and the display, which assumes I'm playing by TTY) to become mostly natural -- probably 8-10 hours. Now I can "see" the world at a glance, except for some obscure glyphs for rare items or enemies...but now the gameplay has become too boring. It's too much like work. No, you moronic dwarf! Harvesting food is WAY more important than cleaning up broken rock! Why do I have to tell each of you individually? I hear there are some tools that go on top of DF that make that less painful, but then I'm not sure what the point is (I wasn't a big fan of the Sims, either).

Uh...the LJ game? I play that one a lot. Y'know, type a bunch of stuff, and then hit post, and text comes back. The game designers were slacking off during level design, though.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I have peeked at Wesnoth a coupla times, when I evidently wasn't in the mood. It looks like a fan-port of the old Sega Genesis game Warsong, which I can't complain about. (In fact, your noting it in Facebook status helped get me into the mood for some gaming!) Maybe I will go look again.

I thought LJ2 : Red Alert was gonna totally kick ass from all the hype, but I never really heard much more about it after it launched...

[queue.livejournal.com]

I've been playing Wesnoth again, too, lately. Am also thinking about doing some messing with it. I'd never really looked at the multiplayer stuff before, but I just recently checked out the "Mech Wars" add-on, and it's got some pretty funky things (dwarves in mechs, using fuel to move, ammo to shoot, real ranged weapons). I hadn't realized that that much customization was possible just in a unit. Many possibilities to think of.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I'm still playing Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection.

Why don't you pick that up for the wii?

Warning: I can't really recommend the predecessor, which was simply "Pinball Hall of Fame" which had the Gottleib collection. Worse physics.

If you get the wii version of Williams Collection, you get two extra games PS2 (and PSP? Not sure) don't have. One isn't worthwhile really, but the other is a game from the '80s called Sorceror.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I second the recommendation for PHoF: Williams, which I think he's seen me raving about before. It completely ate my brain for a while before I went on to obsess over Mario Kart Wii and then Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Just today I started itching to go play it again, because I saw something called "Sorcerer" somewhere and it reminded me of the pinball machine of the same name, which is one of the less memorable games in the collection but is still good.

If you ever liked Eighties-early Nineties solid-state pinball machines like Black Knight, Pinbot and Funhouse, if you ever think you might have liked them if you had the chance, this is the game to have. It seems to have received very little publicity and gone straight to bargain racks on release, hidden among pathetic dumpware. Which makes some sense, I guess, since the demand for pinball is limited, but that raises the question of why so much effort was lavished on it--the overall presentation is a little cheesy but the games themselves have been lovingly simulated.

While I didn't like the tables in the Gottlieb collection as much, some of them were potentially interesting (if you prefer pre-1978 electromechanical pinball, it has more of those), and it's too bad that the game was buggier. It'd be nice if they came out with a refresh of that using the Williams disc's engine, but I'm probably dreaming here.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Did you notice how some sounds are missing from at least Black Knight? Unless my memory is wrong. On the left-hand ramp spinner, when it's lit, it is supposed to sound similar to the sound effect for when you go to the next wave in Robotron. Also, when you win the right to fight the B.K. again in multi-player mode, a kind of rhythmic clock sound is missing. Did it seem to you like the points in bonus are tallied more quickly in the sim than they were in the B.K. game itself? Or maybe it just seemed longer in my memory.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I didn't spend enough time playing Black Knight back in the day to be able to tell. My big pinball period was a few years later, and I played Star Trek: TNG and Twilight Zone more than anything else.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...That other bonus game is an early 1970s electromechanical game called Jive Time that is evil. I started out just being frustrated by it (while admiring its deceptively sunny Yellow Submarine-ish styling), but eventually came to a perverse appreciation of its random cruelty.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I hope they put out Stern and Bally collections. And more volumes of Williams and Gottleib and and and.

Littlewing has made available a language designed for pinball construction, but I think it's a little beyond my ambitions right now. http://code.google.com/p/ypsilon/

[mogaribue.livejournal.com]

Bionic Commando Re-Armed, the MUDs Ancient Anguish and Armageddon, a wee bit of Dwarf Fortress

[mr-choronzon.livejournal.com]

I just read that mike patton does the commando's voice. awesome.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

We are playing through the Paper Mario series on Wii at the moment. They are quite, quite charming if you can cope with how terribly self-referential they are. The third one (Super Paper Mario) has the best, funniest story. Although the bits with Bowser in 2 are pretty amusing.

[jazzfish]

Darwinia, except that the %&$ spiders keep spawning and kicking my ass. (I think this will be available on XBLA fairly soon.)

Sly Cooper for PS2. Hey, I just got the device a year ago, I've got kind of a backlog to work through.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Darwinia! That was fun, except the final level kicked my ass. I did not understand how to do it. The spiders were unending; there were an infinity of spiders. Plus the engine got pretty slow on my moderately ancient G4 Mac.

It should make a good XBLA pick.

[roboknee.livejournal.com]

I'm splitting time between Rogue Galaxy and City of Heroes.

Ah Psyvhonauts, what a wonderful game. I'm finished at only at 99% completion because I can't find 2 of those transparent memory things.

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying some of the Adventure Game Studio stuff from Yahtzee, which I just blogged about. Short games.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Your description of Dwarf Fortress, as well as Metahacker's reply, reminded me of that line from The Matrix: "I don't even see the code anymore. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead..." My problem with the game wasn't the interface, it was just the depth/learning curve. Seems like I'd have to put in a couple of months to a year of learning just to see whether it's fun and rewarding enough to be worth the effort.

As for what I've been playing recently, I've been mostly picking up old PS2 games for really cheap. My latest acquisition is Super Bust-A-Move, for $10 used. Prior to that was Castle Shikigami 2, a Japanese vertical scrolling shooter, which is $6.00 brand new. Prior to that was The Bard's Tale, a very well done and amusing hack-n-slash RPG.

On the Mac front, I spent a good chunk of last year addicted to Peggle.