Where now?

It’s been about a month and a half since my last post. I should say a little something to let anyone who still has this in their RSS feed that I’m still around, and intend to start posting again posthaste. I fully intended to to start posting in February, but February was dominated by a major crunch at work, which wound up stretching into March. But that’s basically over now, and I’m even taking a couple of weeks off from work to recover. So the only thing keeping me from posting now is that I’ve fallen out of the habit somewhat.

At any rate, I played a bunch of games. Most of my gaming time in January was spent on trying out things that I had purchased but not tried, mostly from various bundles and Steam sales. I didn’t finish many; in most cases, I didn’t seriously try. I just wanted to get a better sense of where games are today — and my main conclusion is that we seem to be in the golden age of tower defense. But I also discovered that I own two distinct Qix clones, and I’ll have a thing or two to say about that. I played a chapter or two of Assassin’s Creed, but ultimately decided not to commit to it until I was writing again, because there’s a great deal to say about it — the narrative structure alone is worth a post. I got a great deal farther in Lego Batman, which I have relatively little to say about that I didn’t already say about Lego Star Wars, but I suppose is still worth a post or two. And I played a whole lot of Terraria.

Even during the crunch, I got some good iOS gaming time in on the bus to work, starting with Infinity Blade and the recommendations Gregory Weir made in response to my post on Angry Birds. I’ve finished most of them already; I’m finding that non-“casual” games for iOS tend to skew short, unless they’re ports from other systems. And yes, I have tried a couple of console-to-iOS ports; I’ve had my first real taste of Phoenix Wright this way, as well as gotten started on Final Fantasy III. FF3 used to be in a sort of deadlock state for me. For a while, the only platform it existed on in the US officially was the Nintendo DS. I had plans to get a DS as soon as I had finished all my GBA games, which I’ve very nearly done: the only one left is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. But I remember thinking when I played the original Kingdom Hearts that I really wanted to play the rest of the Final Fantasy games before playing any more in that franchise, so I’d understand all the references. Well, the rise of phones and tablets as gaming platforms has cut that loop, and also made my eventual DS purchase far less likely.

The one thing I didn’t do was look at my older titles. This is because I somehow felt that I shouldn’t be playing them unless I’m also writing about them. So the blog continues to be counterproductive for shrinking the Stack even when I’m not writing it! I will say this, though: I’ve come to the conclusion that I should be considering the titles I own on physical media separately from the ones I only have through Steam or whatever, and possibly only consider the former as Stack material. This would give me a goal that I could possibly finish in my lifetime.

I’ll still blog about other games, of course. In my previous post, I promised to say something about Solar 2, and I intend to make good on that tomorrow.

5 Comments so far

  1. danowar on 18 Mar 2012

    Hi, good to hear from you again.

    I have three “Stacks”, so to speak:
    – My physically owned games (ca. 260)
    – My Steam account (257)
    – My GOG account (they don’t have a count, I’d say 80-90% of their catalogue *cough*)

    If I would see this all as my one and only Stack, I’d go “I will never finish all of this!”.

    My Backloggery currently contains all of my physically owned games and will remain so until some distant day in the future. Otherwise I’d probably not have any fun looking at the numbers getting higher continuously. (I don’t buy physical games anymore, apart from very few exceptions)

    So, what do I want to say with all this? Oh yeah, I approve of the idea that your Stack be all your physical games.

  2. FelixSH on 18 Mar 2012

    Great, you are back. I´m looking forward to read new, interesting analyses from you.

    I have a big stack myself, something around 200 games I think, but I think of it more like a journey. As long as I have something to play, I´m happy. I don´t want to end this situation.

  3. paul on 19 Mar 2012

    Hooray! The stack is back!

  4. malkav11 on 25 Mar 2012

    For my tastes, there are a lot of quality games on DS and while a few titles like Phoenix Wright and FFIII have been ported to iOS, it’s not actually all that common (for example, I don’t believe the entire rest of the Ace Attorney series has made that transition, and they’re very good.)

    But then, I also really don’t enjoy gaming on iOS and would, now that I’ve tried it, look horrified at any suggestion that this is the future of portable gaming.

  5. Jason Dyer on 5 May 2012

    Congrats on how well the new game is doing! Looks like the crunch paid off.

Leave a reply