MAR 07

2024

Thursday: despite my plans, I didn't get to bed until after 4 AM, which meant I slept in pretty late. In the afternoon, I went to the Subway near GameStop for lunch as I wanted to preorder Unicorn Overlord, but I forgot that the PS4 version is digital-only. From there, I went to Acme, and then Giant, and then the other Acme, because I was having trouble finding pizza crusts. I also forgot that we decided the Boboli pizza crusts were good enough to switch to, so I'll have to keep that in mind for next time. In any event, my evening stream fell through, and while I should have switched to working on my project, I actually split my time between Hearthstone (still doing the Fast Forward twist format in which old metagames come back for just one day each) and FFXIV (in which I'm finally into the Endwalker branch of the Manderville quest chain, and also still doing lots of fishing). Not sure where my focus is this weekend, but it's not anywhere I can access it.

2023

Tuesday: been really hooked on this one particular Disco Elysium stream from this guy Etalyx. I started Monday night and I got a watched a bunch more on Tuesday. It's an infuriating stream, in some ways, but I persist.

2022

Big meme on SB today about posting about one iconic game from every five years of your life. I enjoyed writing my response so much, I'm reproducing it here:

5: Galaga. I never went to many arcades growing up, but arcade cabinets were all over the place in 1987. Grocery stores, Pizza Hut—hell, even the recreation area at my parents' racquetball gym had a couple of machines, and the one I spent the most time watching (and rarely playing) was Galaga. Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong were too hard for me, and Centipede was too scary because of how fast and chaotic it seemed, but Galaga was approachable: enemies appeared in small clusters, they stayed in a relatively stationary formation, and the attract mode showed off an incredible secret: if you let your first ship get captured by the tractor beam, you could shoot down the responsible enemy with your second ship to double your firepower. As far as I was concerned, this was the entire point of the game.

10: Clue. I did not play Clue: what I did was launch the game and listen to the incredible opening music/cinematic. (I wouldn't start playing games on my own without a co-player until 1993 as an 11-year-old with the release of Secret of Mana.)

15: GoldenEye 007. The Nintendo 64 was the first time I got a game console (close to) its launch, and while I spent a lot of time with a lot of games during this console generation, GoldenEye was my first FPS. I barely played the single-player mode, preferring to plug in four controllers and make up my own games and activities in multiplayer, seeing how quickly I could navigate the corridors of the Complex to find an enemy's new spawn point, or trying to bank grenades through the high windows in the Temple. I was surprised to discover that all this solo practice translated into decent multiplayer FPS skills, once I started playing other people at parties and lock-ins.

20: NeverWinter Nights. While I spent a lot of time playing PS2 games in this period, the release of NeverWinter Nights presented something special: the ability to create custom modules using its level editor, character editor, and scripting tools. The disappointment I felt in the original game was rendered irrelevant by the quality of the modules released by fans, and at this point I was still obsessed with tinkering with the tools, even if none of my projects reached a point of completion that made them worth sharing.

25: Pokemon Pearl. There was a period in which I held an academic fascination with competitive pokemon play—Pokemon Emerald was the newest game at that time, and then once it came out, I bought Pokemon Pearl as well. Pearl is also the only Pokemon game in which I got that game's legendary and finished the story, lthough I came nowhere close to finishing the pokedex. (Honorable mentions for this year go to Crackdown—too short—and Knytt Stories, which would be more important to me in later years.)

30: World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. After the 1-2 punch of The Sims Online and FFXI at their respective launches, I swore off MMOs altogether. The popularity of WoW's Wrath of the Lich King expansion made me question this decision. When Cataclysm released two years later, I decided to give it a try, and WoW soon became the game that I spent the most time with. 2012's Mists of Pandaria expansion was my most satisfying period with the franchise, and I spent much of the next decade chasing that dwindling high.

35: NieR: Automata. 2017 was a year packed with incredible new games, but what stands out to me now is that this was when I started spending as much time watching streamers and YouTube as I did playing games myself. Watching other players get blindsided by Automata’s unexpected turns was a big part of why this felt so rewarding.

40: Final Fantasy XIV. Granted, I won’t turn 40 for a couple more weeks, but enough of the writing's on the wall for me to get the message already. FFXIV is good, and I haven't even started Heavensward yet, so I'm on-track to experience "the good stuff" after my birthday on the 29th.