Gaming

Been playing Zelda, Tears of the kingdom. I’ve blocked all the relevant keywords as to not get spoiled, but now the game is out for quite a bit of time and people are just posting vids and memes without spoilers messages of the keywords. It’s such a huge and beautiful game and I want to explore it on my own time, but I’m scared it’s a race against the clock before I get a spoiler on something.

Big thing for me recently has been quitting Destiny 2. I've invested an...embarrassing amount of time into that game and while there's zero regret about the friends I made and the good times I've had, the game has just progressively moved further and further away from what I enjoyed about it. It's just not something I feel the same way about anymore. Feels weird(but not bad) no longer being tied down to a "main" game.

...but yeah, been nice to catch up on some single player stuff. Playing Tears of the Kingdom quite a bit but Diablo IV is really hitting that loot dopamine part of my brain Destiny did so that's the main thing right now.

Im enoying the amount of single player games I suddenly have available. Dead island2, darkest dungeon2, totk.

It feels almost petty to mention, but my main problem with gaming these days is choice... there's just too much. I have a SteamDeck packed with over a decade of Humble Bundles and giveaways. I have a MiSTer FPGA with 10,000 retro games. I have subscriptions throwing me more games in a month than I could play in a year... and amid all that choice, I found I was playing none of it.

So I've taken steps. On retro devices, I've taken to removing the full ROM sets (or hiding them from view) and just selecting a handful of games that I used to own, or definitely want to play. In Steam, I've started a collection list of games I'm interested in and I only ever pick from that.

And, somehow, it works. Seeing only three or four games to choose from somehow short circuits that panic response of seeing three or four thousand. It's easier to fixate on a game, or to find something to genuinely enjoy about a title that may not be that perfect experience otherwise, rather than discarding it quickly and moving on to the next fleeting thrill.

I picked up Pathfinder: Kingmaker after a very long hiatus and I'm enjoying it a lot once I decided to lower the difficulty so I can focus on the story and not on the intricate ruleset.

My favorite part is the kingdom management.

I just got back from an arcade bar, where I played a bunch of retro games like Frogger, Q-Bert, Tetris, Street Fighter II, you get the vibe.

It's so fascinating playing these old cornerstones of the gaming industry and thinking of how much video games have morphed over their history. The first thing that comes to mind is how the way we think of gameplay has completely changed; these old arcade cabinets have very simple but entirely unforgiving mechanics, whereas nowadays I feel like I need two tutorials and a read-through of a manual before I can approach a game, but once you get the hang of a game's particularities stuff gets easier in a way?

Like, the premise of Frogger is exceedingly simple; cross the street without getting killed. The challenge comes from the mechanics. Stuff gets faster, things are more hectic, you have less time to calculate your next move.

Whereas modern game mechanics are kinda smoothed out. There are less pixel-perfect maneuvers and places where timing is important, there's a bigger emphasis on exploration, figuring things out, interacting with the game world. Like just think of the differences between the original Super Mario Bros' gameplay and say Super Mario Odyssey. I'm not saying one style is better than the other, I definitely enjoy both retro and modern games, but the different priorities as preferences and technology evolved over time are immensely fascinating to me.