GAMES OBSCURA

The year was two thousand and six. Sony had just launched their PS3 and Nintendo their Wii, but the Xbox had been on the market a full year, getting sales, getting new developers, and locking down exclusive games. Halo 2 was still going strong in the dorms at colleges around the country and the brogamer trends were already starting to appear very clearly.

The Wii launch was a smash success on the level far exceeding their competition, but this article isn’t about that… it’s about how terrible the PS3 was at launch, and how Xbox blew their headstart and fumbled their launch into the next console generation.

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Today marks the 25th birthday of Nintendo’s pocket gaming sensation: the GameBoy. As it was a giant influence in my thoroughly nerdy life, I thought it appropriate to write up a celebratory post to mark the occasion.

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I have four days of class left before we’re out for a week and some change for Spring Break. In the time since last writing here, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to games, but here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve made time for anyway:

I’ve fiddled with Hearthstone as much as I can (during the week and on weekends), and it makes me sorely miss the days of playing Magic: The Gathering in friends basements. Luckily, I’ve gotten a few friends into it as well, and so the battles we’ve had have given me a small taste of that old favorite.

I’ve given about 20 hours to Bravely Default, and in that time have almost gotten through Chapter 2 of its wonderful story. When it comes to RPGs like this, I do all the sidequests and try to grind my way up as far as I can stand before pressing forward with the main story. The changes to classic JRPG formulas present in Bravely Default are certainly welcome, but jeezus is the story super typical. At times, it is even hard for me to listen to or watch main story elements play out because its so tropey. Really hope that Bravely Second can improve on the core story some, because the side-story elements are great and hilarious. More of that next time, please and thank you.

Three’s on iOS has stolen a ton of freetime from random parts of my weekly schedule. I got addicted to Flappy Bird like everyone else and managed a score of 85 before trying to limit my intake of it. Hopilite has also taken away a bunch of my time lately… and I just found Lyne today and have already unlocked most of that game. Definitely check it out if you have an Android or iOS device and a couple bucks to spare.

Knocked out the first part of Broken Age a few weeks back, and holy shit was it too good to be an episodic adventure. Cannot wait for the next chapter to be released this summer.

OlliOlli has been a great reason to pick up the Vita everyday. Doing the daily challenges after a few warmup rounds makes me wish I could actually beat the last area without throwing my Vita against the wall, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get that good at the game to accomplish that. However, it should be out on PC later this year, so maybe I can tackle it again then. 

There are a handful of other mobile games I’ve messed with here and there, but for the most part, this semester has been fairly school focused as was the last. 

Here’s hoping that I can get in some good, long hours of gaming in the upcoming spring break. I know my consoles could use the attention, and I could use the zone-out time. 

Just 4 more days. I can make it…

Confession time: I have a real bad habit of buying more games than I have time to play.

I see a Steam sale for a game I’m halfway interested in it? Why not buy it now to ensure I don’t pay more later. A new game has me pumped about jumping into its world, story, or online friendzones… and it just so happened to go on presale somewhere AND includes the future DLC? I am, of course, way into that. Walk by a bargain bin and see a decent/bad game for $5? Sure, I just won’t eat out after leaving the store tonight. 

This isn’t a problem most of the time, but becomes one when I actually have the freetime to play games. Where do I start? How do I choose? Should I just sell the shit I probably won’t touch? It’s fairly frustrating because when it comes time to game, guilt shouldn’t enter into this beautiful hobby of ours. 

Over winter break, it gets to be pretty simple though, because there are a ton of Game of the Year lists floating around every website ever, and I can just pick the games I own from those and push through them if they can hold my interest. If not, I move on to the next and leave a mental note to come back later (or not at all, if it was really terrible). 

That’s exactly how I spent most of this past winter break, and so I thought I would run through what all I played, how far I got, and a quick blurb on what I thought before school really gears up to full-speed and I go back into my playing/writing when there is precious little freetime.

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With the end of each year, I find myself gathering a bunch of games I missed thanks to school, work, and the like, to cram them into my winter break as healthily as possible. Because, once the school year starts up, it’s back to gaming on weekends and keeping my head down during the week. This means that a lot of games go onto a list of things to buy instead of a shelf of things I own. It also means that just about every break from school is little more than a frenzied rush to stay up to date on a field that moves incredibly too fast. 

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started and finished a dozen games, many of which are on this list in some capacity. Some were in 2013, and some were in the very front-end of 2014… but for the sake of this list, they are 2013 games because that’s when they came out goddammit.

So here, in alphabetical order, are my ten top games of 2013:

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I have a lot of games to choose from when I pull out my iPod or HTC One for games. There are full-featured games like Sword & Sworcery, auto-run titles like Punch Quest, and puzzle outings like Hundreds. 

But the newest thing to steal time away from all of those categories is a simple little game called Dots: A Game About Connecting. It’s visually simplistic, every finger flick feels fluid, and the sound effects are just plain right to the ears. 

Whether you read the rest of this post or not, you need to go try this game. Not just because it’s good enough to recommend up front, but because I need more friend scores to compete against.

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It was one day before the game launched when I found out about SteamWorld Dig. My friend Ashley, always the indie-game enthusiast, pointed me to a trailer on YouTube, and my excitement immediately went through the roof.

I bought it day one and spent the past week making my way through it’s beautiful, fun, steam-filled world; finding all the minerals, killing all the enemies, getting all the power-ups, and eventually, beating the game. And for just $9 in the 3DS eShop, the level of enjoyment that I got out of this title feels like a complete steal.

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