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Act Casual
Sep. 30th, 2014 10:05 pmRecently a conflation of many disparate events--specifically, watching that Five Nights At Freddy's LP and subsequently a bunch of others, waking up my long-dormant Steam account to play with Universe Sandbox, and my brother and me trying to explain video game logic to Mom using examples from Day of the Tentacle puzzles--has made me come to a realization: I miss point-and-click games. Suddenly I've been fondly looking back on the good times I had as a tiny little game nerd floundering my way through Myst with the help of the weirdly novelish player's guide, since I lacked the cognitive development necessary to really figure out what the hell I was doing.
So I've been tooling around Steam and my Kindle's app store trying to satisfy my dopamine needs,* sampling various games based on important factors like user reviews and, importantly, what's on sale. And it's working--I'm having a fine old time playing casual and more in-depth adventure games. So far I've enjoyed The Book of Unwritten Tales (fun puzzles, humor like Bad Discworld), its prequel the Critter Chronicles (where, to their credit, the humor got less annoying), and a stack of Artifex Mundi and similar casual games (which offer about a million layers of sociological analysis fodder, what with way they seem to market to females and are less "hardcore" but more story-driven with tragic romance and so forth, but fuck you they're PRETTY and the stories aren't bad). I have a few others queued up (Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People has been on my list for a while) but am always looking for more. If you give me a good space-themed casual adventure puzzle game, I will ... well, probably I'll just be very happy, but if we turn "make Amelia happy" into an achievement, your brain will think it's a real reward, and that'll be great!
Probably I'm overdoing it at the moment because I'm excited about this, and it could easily become a money pit if I'm not careful,** but it's really nice to return to some absurd problem-solving adventure.
By the way, I'm Polmelia on Steam, if anyone's interested, too!
*I wonder why something like managing to make a cup of tea comes with such a feeling of triumph in video games when in reality locating a kettle, tea bags, teapot, mug, and tea leaves filling the kettle with water, turning on the stove, boiling the water, pouring the tea leaves and the boiling water into the teapot, letting it steep for fourish minutes, and pouring the tea through the strainer into the mug is just a thing you do to get tea. It's almost as if game design has tapped into a collection of terrifyingly effective psychological hacks. I hope they use this awesome power responsibly.
**I have a complicated thing going right now where I OWN Portal 2 but can't actually PLAY it because [pointless boring computer fuckery]. I could easily re-buy it on Steam, but dammit I already own it so I'll just save it for when I fix my computer fuckery. Money, dangit!
So I've been tooling around Steam and my Kindle's app store trying to satisfy my dopamine needs,* sampling various games based on important factors like user reviews and, importantly, what's on sale. And it's working--I'm having a fine old time playing casual and more in-depth adventure games. So far I've enjoyed The Book of Unwritten Tales (fun puzzles, humor like Bad Discworld), its prequel the Critter Chronicles (where, to their credit, the humor got less annoying), and a stack of Artifex Mundi and similar casual games (which offer about a million layers of sociological analysis fodder, what with way they seem to market to females and are less "hardcore" but more story-driven with tragic romance and so forth, but fuck you they're PRETTY and the stories aren't bad). I have a few others queued up (Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People has been on my list for a while) but am always looking for more. If you give me a good space-themed casual adventure puzzle game, I will ... well, probably I'll just be very happy, but if we turn "make Amelia happy" into an achievement, your brain will think it's a real reward, and that'll be great!
Probably I'm overdoing it at the moment because I'm excited about this, and it could easily become a money pit if I'm not careful,** but it's really nice to return to some absurd problem-solving adventure.
By the way, I'm Polmelia on Steam, if anyone's interested, too!
*I wonder why something like managing to make a cup of tea comes with such a feeling of triumph in video games when in reality locating a kettle, tea bags, teapot, mug, and tea leaves filling the kettle with water, turning on the stove, boiling the water, pouring the tea leaves and the boiling water into the teapot, letting it steep for fourish minutes, and pouring the tea through the strainer into the mug is just a thing you do to get tea. It's almost as if game design has tapped into a collection of terrifyingly effective psychological hacks. I hope they use this awesome power responsibly.
**I have a complicated thing going right now where I OWN Portal 2 but can't actually PLAY it because [pointless boring computer fuckery]. I could easily re-buy it on Steam, but dammit I already own it so I'll just save it for when I fix my computer fuckery. Money, dangit!
