Ease Back
It was touch-and-go there for a little while. The addiction had reached fever pitch and when the initial dosage was no longer cutting the mustard, I went looking for new flavors to tame the beast. Even those dark passages held no escape from the burning light and eventually I had to just close my eyes and fall backward, letting faith in stable hands stave my hungers.
I’m back on the wagon though, tentatively. I think I’m more constrained now, a little older, a little wiser. I mean you start with gamerscore chasing and the next thing you know you’re wiping bits of demo disc off your greasy shirt front with model-paint smeared fingers and picking polyhedral dice from your undershorts as the family you once loved retreats from you like an oncoming hurricane. If nothing else, you can’t maintain the pace very long.
Yet gaming is sort of my thing so while I occasionally have to reset the blitz, fall back into a 3-4 and give the opposing line a false sense of security, eventually I bring the house again.
The big change I made was that after the demise of $60 a Month, I made a bald-faced liar out of myself and stopped the program. It wasn’t just a fiscal adjustment, I simply couldn’t find enough to keep my mind engaged. Trying to spend a steady amoun on a hobby that ebbs and flows is interesting as an exercise but in practice it boils down to setting interesting things aside in favor of a new distraction whose merit is mere freshness.
So I dipped my toe by combing through my stack of shame and dragging out a few titles that had been lost in the trampling rush of The Next Thing and here’s what I found:
- Oblivion - I went back and started a fresh character with the sole purpose of finally completing the Thieves Guild quest which had glitched out on me in my previous effort. It is, I think, the best overall narrative in the game pulling slightly ahead of the Assassin’s Guild questline. I realized as I played why I love the whole world and the way Bethesda executes on the idea of the semi-sandbox RPG. I also realized that I would never go back and play through the expansion quest that I paid good money for because the spoils it may yeild are nothing to the agony of suffering through an entire quest I can’t bring myself to even want to explore.
- Eternal Sonata - After I finished with Oblivion (and I really had to put a strict cap on it: Finish Task X, quit the game), I was still in the mood for some role-playing style games so I tried on ES for a bit. It’s every bit as beautiful as I remember and I wasn’t far in so I started over. The combat is elegant but, like most Japanese-style RPGs, it’s not so elegant that I don’t find it eventually tiresome. Especially since these games, and ES in particular, tend to cluster repetitive enemy types within a single area you have to spend an amount of time in. I can handle a dozen or so similar fights but when you start stretching into the triple-digits with combat versus the same two foes that unfolds identically every time except it becomes slightly easier as your level ramps up, I go looking for a blankie and something soft to lay my head on.
- Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - This was one of the first DS games I picked up and I played it extensively without having played a Castlevania game since I think Castlevania III on the NES. It was new to me then and I did a lot of things wrong as a result. Since then I’ve played Symphony of the Night, Rondo of Blood and was just waiting to try this again with a bit more XP. It’s even better now.
- Fallout 3 - I rented this because having touched on Oblivion again I was feeling the shine return, but was unwilling to let Cyrodiil consume me yet again. Next best thing? Oblivion’s post-apocalyptic younger brother. Having played maybe twenty minutes of the original Fallout without a manual and no patience to devote to unraveling its mysteries (at the time) the long way. Thus I entered Fallout 3 with only my gamer’s preconceptions of the game as a dark comedy role-playing game often hailed by the community. I was instantly struck by how somber the game is. Oblivion can’t exactly be accused of having a great sense of humor, but that’s okay for a game that doesn’t purport to not take itself seriously. To be fair, neither does Fallout 3, but my expectations were somewhere else. It is, by all accounts, Sci-Fi Oblivion, so from that angle it’s exactly as delicious as I hoped it would be. I was a little disappointed that though I rented the PS3 variant it took no discerable advantage of the hard disk, still, I enjoyed almost every minute of my time with it. I made sure to avoid the main quest as much as possible and ended up having Nik pick up the full game for me on eBay so expect to hear more about this one.
- Geometry Wars 2 - In my absence I had lost all but one of my top spots from my Friends List so I tried to earn back the titles. I was… unsuccessful. It’s a game that requires practice I hadn’t put in, you see.
So there you have it… several weeks of gaming as I acclimate to a new job and a new schedule. These also don’t include the tabletop games (which have also been reduced of late) but I figure those will always be played more as time and participants allow rather than based on my own predilictions.