Gaming Posts

If you just want to see my gaming-related posts, you can find them right here!

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2020. (Here is 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak, just like last year. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs.

It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2019. 2018 Awards 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards 2014 Review 2013 Review This year, I’m going to shrink the size of this post considerably. I didn’t buy or play very many games this year, so there’s not much point in making a huge affair out of it. I’m going to list all the games I bought this year, then I’m going to pick the ones I liked best, and that’s it.

I had designs on writing at least something about all fifteen episodes of Death Stranding, but I’m getting tired of this already. The problem is that there is so much to go over, especially at the beginning and at the end. After the last post, I learned what “BT” stands for: Beached Things. That explains everything, right? Some of the terminology in this game feels like translation mistakes that they just stuck with and doubled down on.

Previously on The Death Stranding Experience: The Prologue. As we roll into the second hour of the game, you may have noticed I haven’t talked about Death Stranding gameplay very much yet. That’s because, in the first couple of hours of Death Stranding, there isn’t very much gameplay. It’s extremely cut scene-heavy. (It becomes cut scene-heavy at the end as well.) It’s one of the game’s criticisms, though I personally found the cut scenes riveting so I didn’t mind at all.

I finished the story of Death Stranding over the weekend. It took almost 80 hours over the course of two months. I left a large number of optional tasks unfinished, but I’m hoping to get back and do them at some point. It’s definitely the game of the year for me. These 80 hours have been quite an experience. I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to play a AAA game with so much originality, because frankly I didn’t think I would ever see one again in my lifetime.

Here’s a quick rundown of memorable games that I played throughout the decade. These are games that I played more-or-less continuously for a month or more (that I remember, at least). In between these games were plenty of others, but these are the ones that made the biggest impact on me. Age of Conan. 2010. I can’t find many records of what I played in 2010. Age of Conan, WoW. (ref)

I briefly mentioned the category “Ongoing Games” in my last post (or “post”) as a potential replacement for the terms “MMORPG” and/or “MMO.” Even before I saw Jeromai’s post, which I agree with, I started to doubt my own judgment about it. The more I thought about it, the more “Ongoing Game” meant nothing whatsoever. It might as well be “Game.” Almost any game could fit into this category in 2019.

I try to avoid “tweet storms” that go beyond two or three threaded tweets but I couldn’t resist the temptation to live tweet the Game Awards last night, as I was just sitting in front of the television and a laptop. My assumption is that people can mute tweet threads if they find them annoying (and let’s be honest, every tweet thread is always annoying to someone). It’s the first time I’ve watched them, and probably the last time as well.

I picked up a game called Outward on sale for $20 a while back. It looked like a fun single-player third-person RPG, and the emphasis on starting weak and earning your rewards appealed to me. My jaunty adventurer with a big permanent smile on his face. I almost immediately regretted my purchase. The voice acting isn’t very good, and they do that thing I really hate where they only speak the first line, leaving you to read the rest of it.

I don’t exactly write “reviews” here on the ol’ blog, but these are my thoughts about the XIM APEX Adapter. It’s a USB gadget that plugs into a Playstation 4 (or an Xbox One, allegedly) and allows you to use a mouse and keyboard to play games that otherwise could only be played with a controller. You may or may not have noticed a recurring theme here in the past year, which is that I constantly mention how much the PS4 controller hurts my hands.

I’ve heard about Death Stranding for years, but I’ve never had any idea what kind of game it is. Shortly after the game begins. I tried to read some reviews, but I simply couldn’t stand to visit any of the major games journalism web sites to read them. Every game web site is completely obscured by ads that cover almost 75% of the screen, blinking at you, playing videos at you, whatever.

Over the weekend, I noticed Steam was giving away a free trial of this game called Generation Zero, which I’d never heard of before. So I thought I’d try it. I kind of miss those Halcyon days of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, when I got to play a brand new game every day. I didn’t even know what this game was, to be honest. It sounded like a shooter. But it said it was “set in Sweden,” which is something I’ve certainly never seen before in a game.

Naithin poked some of us on the Blaugust Discord to chime in on this: If you could only play five games in a year, what would they be? It turns out this would not be a terribly big sacrifice for me. I don’t play a lot of games in a year to start with. I’ve already done some research for my 2019 year-end post, and the number of new games that I’ve purchased and started in 2019 is extremely small.

I don’t get into Halloween much at all, but this year I thought I would break with tradition and try to find a scary game to play. You know, one of those kinds of games that makes the streamers whimper and cry and scream and jump, for the lulz and the clicks. I’m not especially prone to being scared by a game, and I’ve played a number of horror games before that I didn’t find particularly scary, but I wondered if I could find one out there.