Sometimes I sit down at my computer and open up a blank post and just sit there staring at the screen, hoping something pops into my head. And then other times I’ll be doing something else and 600 different ideas start showing up and I have to stop whatever it is I’m doing so that I can write them down. This doesn’t mean that any of these ideas are interesting, of course, but I’d rather write something down than nothing. (This is how I tend to write lyrics these days, also, which is why it’s taken me over a year to work on this album, and even after all this time I’m still not where I want to be on that front. But that’s another story.)
Anyway: last night I headed down to the basement to decompress and play something that wasn’t No Man’s Sky, and my brain went bananas.
My train of thought went something like this:
– It’s 8:30pm; the kid’s asleep, the wife is upstairs. My rental copy of Deus Ex probably won’t show up until Thursday, but I really want to play it now. But it’s 40GB+… even if I bought it, I still wouldn’t be able to play it until tomorrow night. Maybe it’s a good thing that my poor impulse control and need for instant gratification has been trumped by my slow internet.
– So, then, let me get back into that Witcher 3 DLC that I’d put down a few months ago. Oh, wait, shit, it’s been a few months and my hands are still used to No Man’s Sky‘s control scheme. How do I play this game again? And is this a thing that’s going to keep happening as I continue to get older, that I forget how to play games with complicated-ish controls?
– The difference between No Man’s Sky and The Witcher 3 in terms of how they handle their open world exploration could not be more different.
– I still adore The Witcher 3 – it’s one of my favorite games of all time, probably – but it’s not the sort of game that I can just dip in and out of. I feel like I need to set aside a full day without interruptions in order to play it the way I’d like.
– Shit, I’m not enjoying Witcher 3 as much as I’d like. Let me switch gears. Do I want to restart Fallout 4, which is something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a few weeks? Is it even worth it, considering the influx of new stuff that’s about to land? Can I allow myself to get into it, considering that I’d originally thought it one of the most disappointing games I’d ever played? Or is it simply that Witcher 3 has completely ruined Bethesda’s RPGs for me?
– I’m gonna go back to No Man’s Sky. Oh, shit, here’s a kick-ass ship that I can actually afford! Hey, all right. Whoops, it’s 11:30pm! I should probably go to sleep.
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Nathan Grayson’s piece over at Kotaku story about “The Guy With The Lowest Possible Rank In Overwatch” is wonderful.
“What I found was that the people in the 40s were much more willing to try and still work together because these are probably people like me who are winning some but losing more,” Brown said. “Then when I got into the 30s, I was starting to see people who still have vague hope.”
Overwatch’s season one skill rating system was never intended to be a straightforward progression. Through hard work and diligence, you could slowly, painstakingly gain a fraction of a rank, but if you lost even a couple times in a row, you’d almost certainly take a nasty spill down the skill rating ladder. Ultimately, the system was meant to balance out. You were supposed to move up and down within a general ballpark of numbers. Blizzard didn’t do a super great job of making that apparent, though. As Brown observed, that led to players with chips on their shoulders and burning mounds of salt in their hearts.
“In the mid-30s, I met the angriest people in the world,” Brown said. “It’s somewhere in that mid-30s and upper 20s [area], these are just the angriest people in the world. They think they should be doing better and they’re really not good enough, or these are just people stuck on really bad streaks.”
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Confession: I thought I’d gotten over it, but apparently I miss Achievements. Especially since it appears I’m within striking distance of 100K. I could almost certainly break 100K this year if I played all multi-platform games on XB1 (or at least the ones where I wouldn’t necessarily notice a graphical downgrade – like South Park).
I wish the major outlets would go back to including console comparisons in their reviews the way they used to in previous generations – or even at the beginning of this one; I feel like I can’t make an informed decision until Digital Foundry does their analysis, and they almost never have one out before the release day of a significant title. (i.e., Deus Ex.)
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I have given up on my 2nd book so far this year. The first was “Girl On The Train”, and now I’m adding “A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall”. I’m not sure if my being 1 book away from completing my Goodreads challenge has anything to do with it, but I ran out of patience far earlier than usual. I’m willing to put up with an awful lot of pretension, but this was too much.
Shouts From The Couch 