Gaming

Five Years!

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WordPress just informed me that my blog is five years old today! In honour of my blog’s fifth birthday, I thought I’d share five of my favourite posts.

Ramble: The Weed

This is one of my earliest posts, and one I reread on occasion because it reminds me of the fact that sometimes, it’s the little that make life special.

May 6, 2012

I try to spend at least an hour a day in the garden. It’s good for my daughter and it’s good for me.  I’m sure it’s good for the garden too.  As soon as the spring sun peeps from behind the last winter cloud, I don my sturdy boots and stiff new gloves and set to work pulling out all those weeds I was able to ignore when snow or leaves covered the ground.

When I lived in Texas, I battled with more than weeds. The previous year’s vegetable patch often continued to enjoy success in the form of tomato and cucumber seedlings popping up in the most unexpected places—usually the middle of the lawn. Often, I mused that if we went away for a month, we would return to find a tangle of cucumber vines covering the lawn, robust tomato plants poking up between. Sometimes, instead of plucking them out, I just mowed them down, curious to see if they would shoot back up by the end of the week.  They did.

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Parenting in the Time of Zombies 

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I recently finished playing The Last of Us. A writer friend, Mason Thomas, recommended the game to me. Being that we’ve had similar emotional reactions to a number of other games, I suspected I was in for a trip through the “ringer.” I wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t the trip I expected, however. I’ve played a number of BioWare games, so I figured I had the experience of moral ambiguity. Not so much. The Last of Us takes the player on a very different journey and it’s very, very dark.

***I’m not going to give away the ending here, but I will warn you that in my defense of Joel and the decisions he makes throughout his journey, I may step into spoiler territory, so read on at your own risk.*** Continue reading →

Celebrating Two Years of Chaos Station

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2-years

Chaos Station released two years ago today! Because I miss these guys, I decided to recreate them in The Sims 4 and play out the lives they couldn’t have in the 24th century. No war, no space-faring or military careers, nothing to get in the way of their happiness.  I wasn’t at all surprised by how much fun I had replaying Felix and Zed’s love story. What amazed me was how much like the guys my Sims turned out to be. Sure, I designed them and gave them all the right personality traits. But when left to their own devices, they did things that Felix and Zed probably would have done. It was awesome to watch. Continue reading →

5 Video Games I’d Love to Play Again (For the First Time)

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I “borrowed” the idea for this post from a recent feature on Unbound Worlds listing five books to read again, for the first time. I am, of course, working on my own list for that one, but while considering books, I started thinking about the games that rocked my world, the ones I wish I could go back and play again for the first time.

I’ve played a lot of games and this list could get unwieldy if I started at the very beginning. When thinking about early adventures like Zork (played on a Compaq with a little green screen and fold out keyboard) or Asteroids (or anything on the Atari), I acknowledged the greatness and moved forward. I don’t really want to play any of those games again. Instead, the earliest game I’d really like to rediscover is: Continue reading →

Dishonored and Dishonored Again

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I haven’t posted about gaming in forever! I have been playing some great games, though, so it’s time to catch you all up. First, Dishonored and Dishonored 2, two neatly packaged, shorter games that allowed me to complete an adventure in less than six months.

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Downloading a Vacation

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I don’t often buy and/or play extra downloaded content for games. Basically, I’m cheap. I don’t want to pay any more than I already have. More usually it’s a matter of having spent upward of 150 hours exploring the world and being done. I want to move on to the next game. I also have this stubborn (and cheap) belief that if the content is important to the original story, it should have been included. For free. Continue reading →

Railroaded by the Railroad

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I finally finished Fallout 4. (This write up may contain mild spoilers)

I don’t know if it’s that I enjoy exploring post-apocalyptic worlds, or if Bethesda simply excels at creating compelling environments, but I could (and did) spend hundreds of hours wandering ruined America—and that is perhaps my favourite part of any Fallout game, the time lost to roving.

FoodstuffCuriosity is not always rewarded kindly. Scouring the edges of the map will drop you into obscure quests and hair-raising encounters. Foodstuff machines, a stranded ship crewed by robots, loners who should be left alone, atomic cults, a barely operational nuclear sub, aliens and the mother of all mirelurks. I tripped over a hill into a nest of glowing green radscorpions and died horribly (while running away). I hadn’t saved for a while and lost twenty minutes of game play. I reloaded and ventured into the Glowing Sea again, because what’s twenty minutes when you’re already four hours distant from the quest you were absolutely, positively going to finish today? Continue reading →