Monday 15 August 2011

Party like its 2007

In some weird aberration, I appear to be playing (and enjoying) more games from 2007 than 2011. It isn't completely weird when you consider the Steam sales, but the ridiculous Australian pricing of many games has forced me to move to a different supplier (Thanks ozgameshop).

Not only have I completed Bioshock, but I stayed up way past any sensible time last night playing the original Crysis because I was having too much fun. Contrast this with the multiple evenings of game play where I've been stuck on completionist grind (Portal 2, Terraria, Brink - damn your RPG systems for ruining my FPS, the second half of Borderlands and especially the first Witcher - except for Chapter 3 which played refreshingly quickly). I was so worried this morning about the guilty pleasure of Crysis that I checked its score on Metacritic to validate my feelings - it has a better score (91) than any game from this year with the exception of Portal 2.

(In other 2007 game news: My Team Fortress 2 addiction has got to the point where I've gone into voluntary withdrawal until I get an Enforcer drop. Idling is the new methadone).

I'm at the point where I dread playing a game that orders me around with quests and the lure of a new shiny. I've opened Fallout 3 and got as far as the main menu multiple times without actually playing it. My list of games on Steam has started haunting me as a list of things I should feel guilty about not finishing.

I'm enjoying indie puzzlers (Spacechem, Frozen Synapse) in bite size pieces, but small nuggety levels feel too much like quests to me at the moment.

I'd rather have a tasty trail of North Korean bread crumbs.

2 comments:

VRBones said...

.. I'm still back in 2004. This week's hankering was a return to Space Rangers 2 and it still holds up remarkably well. The reboot upgrade of ~2009 gives it a bit more polish than before.

Andrew Doull said...

It's weird when you can be retro towards stuff in the 21st century. My twins are going to be treating Rage against the Machine the way I look at the Kingston Trio..