Blog: Games of September 2021

I'm discovering that trying to create an overall description of a month is kinda hard. In short, I played a lot of fun stuff in September. I finished off the Trials of Mana remake and quite liked it, enough that I wanted to start playing the original in the Collection of Mana. I guess the biggest thing for me was playing through Celeste and really working on developing the skills to get through a hard game. (Thanks PlayFrame!)

My top five games (by play time) for September were:

1. Celeste - I'm not sure the last time I felt really proud of myself for finishing a game, but finishing Celeste, I feel really proud. It took a fair bit of work and a lot of time doing the same thing over and over until I got better at it. I think there are some lessons there in how to practice. There are maybe also some lessons for someone in their late 30s who doesn't move enough, as this is the first game (in a long time) to put me in physical pain.
   
   
   
   I like when games give you a deep knowledge and bond with the spaces in the game and Celeste does a really good job of of linking you with the mountain in the game. There are screens I remember clearly and I think if you showed me any screen in the game know I'd know (more or less) exactly what was going on there. I'm playing through now to find all the strawberries and B-sides, but I've also taken the game up on its very open challenge to speed run it as well.
   


2. Battle Brothers - The brothers roll on. The only thing that's really holding me back is the bit where something seems to be cracking in my PC and Battle Brothers sets it off worse than anything else ... or maybe it's just that Battle Brothers is the game I'm playing.
   
   


3. Trials of Mana (Remake) - This game is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. I enjoyed playing, and the combat was fun if not a really complex system. I think with the option of six protagonists that all played very differently they were limited in how complex they could make the game, especially on a low-to-mid-tier budget. I've started playing the original in the Collection of Mana and I'm impressed at how well they honoured the core feeling of the game in the remake while polishing up the rough edges.
   
   


4. Super Mario Odyssey - I needed something I could play without the strain of Celeste or the headspace needed for Trials of Mana so I found myself picking up Odyssey again. It's still good. In fact, the more I play the more interesting things I find.
   
   


5. Mini Motorways - I had a few days where Mini Motorways really captured me. After a while, though, the bit where it's a randomized puzzle game and not a city builder really started to drive me nuts. It is beautiful and if you're there for hooking up elements in a puzzle you might love this game (especially if you loved Mini Metro).
   
   
6. Mario Golf: Super Rush - Super Rush was pretty good, but the shine has come off for me a little bit. Considering how much I still go back to Toadstool Tour over the years, there's just something that keeps ringing hollow with Super Rush. The new courses they just released are okay and the new golfers they've added are okay, but the whole thing is just missing some life.
   
   
   The online has been a real bust for me. I guess I'll do enough to grab the monthly prize, but it's just not that much fun to play against people, when the only correct move is to wait as long as possible for everyone else to take their shots. The alternative "Timed Golf" mode is too unreliable to play, so the whole thing is just poorly designed.
   

Here's my total play time chart for September:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Blog: Video Games of February 2016

XCOM 2 came out this month and that's really all you need to know about the video games I've played in February. Beyond that I've had fun keeping track of the games I've play for another month. I think it's been interesting to be mindful about what I'm playing and making sure that I'm getting the most out of my XCOM ... I mean games.

My top five games for the month (by play time) have been:

1. XCOM 2 - I played 42 hours of XCOM 2. That's ... a lot of playing. A bit of that is that at $80 (CAD) it felt really expensive, so I felt like I really should be getting my money's worth out of it. The other part is that the game is pretty great.
   
   

   

   The wanted posters are a really great part of XCOM 2.

   
   I found XCOM 2 really hard in the first little while. I mean really, *really* hard. Eventually I knocked the difficult down and it got to the point where I could at least play it. The game was still pretty tough but now that I've played a lot (and I think I'm near the end) it seems to have balanced out (to a bit easy, which is good since I was playing on the easiest level). The new easiness seems to be one part the XCOM hill (oh wow aliens are hard to kill, oh wait this is a new gun, hahahaha take that aliens) and a bit that I've figured out what the designers were going for.
   
   I will say that I really like what they did with XCOM 2, in most missions now there's an imperative (usually a ticking clock, but not always) that you have to push your soldiers out into the field and take on the enemy. That combined with the new generated maps has kept me really enjoying the game. I feel like there should maybe be one more set of enemies to fight, but it's a little hard to say how far along I am, so I've got not complaints right now.
2. Final Fantasy VI (or 3) - It's interesting that this game is the "runner up" for the second month in a row. I had intended to play a little more of it and to try to play more games with narrative. It's suffered a little bit from three problems. 1) XCOM 2 2) I'm tired of random encounters and 3) the Final Fantasy game decompression.
   
   

   

   Looks perfectly safe to me - From GameFAQs User KeyBlade999 

   
   The decompression happens in a lot of final fantasy games (but it sticks out in my mind in VI and VII particularly. Because the games are so heavily based on narrative for the first part of the game (half, two-thirds maybe) when they get to the "open world" part at the end, it can be difficult to feel like you're doing anything other than ticking off the items on the list to make sure that you're as powerful as you can be to beat the boss. I think later games in the series did a better job of fusing side quests into the story, but at this point I have three dragons to kill and I'm not that excited about it.
3. Hearthstone - It's jumped up the list to third but I've actually played a little less this month (again, have I mentioned that XCOM 2 is good?). I've been trying to take more meaningful breaks from work during the day and I can play a round of Hearthstone in about 15 minutes so that works pretty well.
   
   

   

   I've really got to remember to take these screenshots during the month. #imbadathearthstone

   Oh! Also I can now say, "to hell with you Dr. Boom!" I'm looking forward for the switch to standard (where old sets will be rotating out). I had a long layoff from Hearthstone, and while I don't play enough to be totally stocked with legendaries in any event, I definetly am missing the most cards out of Goblins and Gnomes. Also could someone please explain to me how these got to be "the old cards"? This time travel thing is rough.
4. Super Mario Maker - I'm still chugging along with this. It runs a little towards the work end of gaming, between the thought necessary to build a good level and the thought necessary to play through all the other levels pushed out there. It's still a little rough, with some levels being really unplayable or trolling you after several minutes of play, but I think the "meta" is levelling out to produce a bunch of pretty fun levels.
   
   

   

   Jitter and Jump

   I've been messing around with making more playable and fun levels. The one thing the game is a little short on is players, so it's a little tough to see what's interesting and what's not. I'd also love to see the game give you a little bit more information about how people have played your level. If you're interested in playing some of the things I've worked on I'm interested in my 1-1 and 1-2. Apparently my most popular is Jitter, so I'm also trying to follow up with that.
5. Mini Metro - Well I'm definitely not as addicted as I was in January. Mini Metro is good, but I'm not terribly good at it, so I find that a lot of my play sessions end up about the same way. I've also played through all the pre-made maps and now time I play is also a little the same. Stations appear in random locations, but the rules for each area are still the same.
   
   

   

   I'm sorry to all the shapes who live in this town.  You are going to be late for shape work.

   
   Still the game is good and it's fun. I definitely don't regret playing for a few minutes each day. It's also interesting how the achievement "Play the Daily Challenge Each Day for a Week" has kept me coming back. I keep not making it, so I've stuck with it. It seems to have slid into a nice niche with Bejeweled and Zuma Blitz.

So that's the top five by play time. I also tracked the number of sessions which left me with a top five of Bejeweled Blitz, Mini Metro, XCOM 2, Zuma Blitz and Hearthstone. I think this stands to reason, it's mostly the games I play for a couple of minutes at a time ... and XCOM. January had about the same results.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about Diablo 3. I've basically never played Diablo or Diablo 2... (It's ok, you can pass out from shock. I'll wait).

Xin is mostly glad she found pants over the course of my play-through.

(Are you back? Great!) So you can play the first bit of Diablo 3 for free and since I have the Blizzard launcher open often enough I was finally tempted to install it and play the demo. I had fun, but I'm not about to jump in and play the full game right now. One reason is XCOM (surprise) both the money I put into that was my video game budget for the mont (and then some) and it also took most of the playing time. 

Another reason is that the game ends the demo really oddly, instead of popping up a message going, thanks for playing the free part now you can play more if you pay us, the game just stops generating new content. So you can run around all you want, but the world just doesn't do anything. I actually ended up googling to see why the game was broken and even there it wasn't communicated very well (mostly it was people trying to figure out why they got the demo when they'd paid for the full game).

So, I think that's it for the second month of game tracking. I'm still having fun, so I guess you'll see more next month.

Here are my total play time and play sessions for February.

Blog: Video Games of January 2016.

A little while ago, I decided that I'd like to put together a "Game of the Games I Played this Year." This tends to be a little difficult though because I never actually remember what I've been playing after a little while. So, I thought it might be fun/a good idea to keep track of what I played this year.

I seem to have pulled it off, so far, and now, by time played, I have six "top" games for the month:

1. Europa Universalis 4 - I played a lot of EU4 and I did it all in about 4 days (see the chart below). I don't think it would be weird to say I have some very mixed feelings about it, and not just because I'm now terrified of the Commonwealth.  
   
   
   
   
   I like EU4. It has a lot of depth and strategy, (which I'm still miles away from mastering) and the AI is good and not cheating too obviously.  Whenever you sit down to play it's always engaging and you get to make interesting choices and plans.
   
   It's also the worst "one more turn" game I've ever played. I've sat down to play an hour or two and stood up four or five hours later feeling a bit like you've lost control of your life. I found especially I'd only quit after the game punished me badly for making poor choices (see Polish Commonwealth) and so I'd leave with a mixed, my life sucks because I've played one damn game all day, and my life sucks because I just killed 100,000 troops and had to give up six provinces.
   
   EU4 also gets into your brain. I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about plans for the Ottomans and how I was going to expand, or fix a treaty, or get those damned provinces back from the Polish. This tended to make it a little to easy to fire up EU4 and start up again. I had to make a pretty conscious effort to put it away so I could a) actually get real work done and b) play anything else (like Final Fantasy).
   


2. Final Fantasy VI (or 3) (for Super Nintendo) - Since I broke up with Ogre Battle (which I'll write a post about some day), I still feel like the dark days of winter are the days when you're supposed to play fantasy RPGs and Final Fantasy VI is a great game in that category.
   
   
   
   
   I was playing on my original SNES. Which gave me the full Woolseyized text, son of a submariner and all. I tend to think of the SNES version FF3 (with the arabic numeral) verses Final Fantasy VI (with the roman numerals), which applies to the later versions of the game. That may be a crazy thing to do, but it's what's been going on in my head for a while.
   
   Generally I've been having fun. The story feels a little strangled by the translation, but generally is good and once you get going is fun. Combat is good, but random encounters are evil (especially when you're trying to tell a story). There are slightly too many characters for the game to manage and not quite enough reason to trot them out in any quest. There's a button you can push that makes a ninja drop from the ceiling and you can fight him. (Also why are all ninjas undead?)


3. Dishonored - I really like Dishonored (which should really have a u in it somewhere). It's fun and it's easy to slip back into, even if I haven't played in a while. Beyond that I'm feeling excited that we'll get to see Dishonored 2 some time this year (hopefully) and I also want to try my hand at a Let's Play and this seems like a good game to start on.
   
   
   


4. Mini Metro - Holy crap! This little strategy game where you manage a metro system on a metro map is awesome. I played it a little bit when they had the web-only beta version running a while ago. Then it came out for real. I lost a day (oops) to the web-only version on my laptop then looked it up again when I got home and realized that the Steam version was on for $10 (CAD). So since then I've played a lot. I seem to max out most maps at around a 1000 passengers, but I like the variety of maps they have and the daily challenges. The only problem I seem to have (other than the lost day) is that it seems like you can't do the daily challenges all at once.
   
   
   


5. Super Mario Maker - I don't usually set out to play Super Mario Maker that often, it tends to be a game where I see the box sitting by the TV and think, "Oh, I should play an hour." I really like designing levels as an exercise in thinking about game design and I also try to spend at least a little time playing other peoples levels since I think the game is a little low on players vs creators. Since I'm thinking about it, I do have two levels that I made recently that I'm kinda proud of, New Buzzy Lair and Always a Way. You can also see my profile page.






6. Hearthstone - I don't play Hearthstone everyday, but I do like to play at lunch when I can and then occasionally while I'm watching the hockey game or as a way to wind down before bed. I'm not good and I'm lacking a lot of the high end cards to really get me moving (one day, Dr. Boom, one day), but I still have fun. It may not be exactly fair, but I do enjoy that feeling of watching your opponent make a mistake and leave you the opening to get your board control up and stable so you take the game over.
   
   
   

If you're interested, here are my total times in January for every game I played:

The units are in hours, I'm still a little baffled about pivot tables.

and I have a chart of which games I played on which days:

Sorry this looks janky, I'm definetly still trying to figure out how to embed google docs.