Games I will be Playing

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and will be writing out entries, hopefully I can get all thirty days without any breaks, and if I manage to do that (since August has 31 days) I will think of an additional entry to write about.  I have done a 30-day challenge before, it for movies, but that was a while back, feel free to read those too if you like.

            Today is day 29 and the topic is “A Game I Will Be Playing”.

            I do not have a single game earmarked for this topic, so I picked something more nebulous, My Steam Library.  Way back on day 4 I said that the PC was my favorite system to play on, and that was because of Steam, and right now I have a shit ton of games all loaded and ready to play just as soon as I get past that initial push of actually turning them on.

            Let’s look at 5 games I have played for less than an hour, but I still want to play more of them, I just haven’t for whatever reason.

You can almost hear the moody low key score in your head.
Even if you have never played this game you can picture what it sounds like.

            1) “Deadlight”

            While I am sure of the narrative developing it is a solid platforming game.  I imagine that if this game had not been about zombies, which I am kind of sick of at this point.

Let me talk about zombies for a second.  The thing about fads in pop culture when they relate to science fiction and horror elements, be it vampires, werewolves, angels, or aliens; these things tend to show up, they get 4-5 movies or shows, then there is a brief period of backlash when people start to analyze the nuances of why they would and would not work, and finally the fad passes out of the system to get revisited a decade later with a fresh twist.

At this point zombies have not only been deconstructed, they survived the backlash and just kept on walking around, getting even more shows and video game tie ins.  We are going to end up hitting the revisiting/revitalizing stage of the cycle without them having ever dropped out of popular consciousness.  That is weird. 

This game also sounds exactly how you would picture it to.

            2) “Invisible Inc”

            I like turn based strategy, and a stealth game that utilizes a system akin to “X-Com” but for thievery sounds great.  I had actually hoped for a game with fewer narrative elements so I could just play it while doing something else, but with the story kicking in between every mission and sometimes during I can’t split my attention entirely, hence why I have not managed to play thru the thing.  I guess I will have to make time to go thru the thing rather than it just being something I keep busy with.

This is a longer game and has a more diverse sound.

            3) “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning”

            This game has a style, both in gameplay and art, that reminds me a lot of “Fable” and I think that if I just give it a shot it will draw me in, but I’ve played it less than 2 hours.

This actually sounds nothing like I would picture.

            4) “Mark of the Ninja”

            This is a stealth platformer that is fun, but for whatever reason I found myself annoyed by being graded for my performance by the game while at the same time being unsure what it is I needed to do in order to improve my performance.  I think I will have to give it another chance and just ignore the repeated instances of me sucking.

This one sounds like the 90's cartoon adaptation of itself.

            5) “Shadowrun Returns”

            This turn based gameplay added to a cyberpunk setting, but with magic… This seems to have everything I look for in a story based game.  I liked the first half hour, but much like my non-starter romantic relationships in my life, I was afraid to commit.

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Now let’s look at games that are downloaded, and ready to roll, but I haven’t actually played them, instead just looking at them for a few minutes before playing “Age of Empires III” or “Civilization V” again.  These were initially in reverse alphabetical order, because I thought that would provide a strange sense of symmetry to the list (as the previous list is in alphabetical order), but then I realized that if I put them in Alphabetical order I would have started the previous list with zombies and ended this one with zombies, and that seemed even more symmetrical.  I am a bit of a mad person.

I think this has music that is suitably a mix of grim and epic.

1) “Darksiders II”

I played the first one, and while I found it to be over the top it was still fun… Until I hit a boss I couldn’t beat.  I turned the difficulty down, played it several times, and then quit in a huff (This attitude is also why I have not played a lot of “Dark Souls”).  That experience with “Darksiders” left me a little uninterested in trying the sequel, but I got it as part of a game bundle when THQ went out of business and have been willing to give the series another shot but just haven’t yet done so.

Creepy and weird.

            2) “Dishonored”

            This is probably the most well regarded game on this list.  I have no idea why I did not dive into this the day I got it.  I have wanted to, but just haven’t.  I think I might have some deep seeded fear of starting something I will probably enjoy.

Bit of a color change with this title as compare to the previous entries.

            3) “How to Survive”

            Fucking Zombies again.  At least this one has a unique view of the gameplay, and seems to emphasize making weapons to fight the zombies in different ways.

Sexy chick in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Tell me I'm Dreaming.

            4) “Remember Me”

            A science fiction dystopia about manipulating memories and kung fu.  Am I in the Matrix?  No?  Okay.  But that’s what the game is about.

Windmills?  If I had played this it might make sense.

5) “Valkyria Chronicles”

This is a turn based strategy game set in an anime version of World War II, but they don’t call it that.  Cause, Japan.  Which is fine by me.  I have heard tons of good things but much like everything else I just haven’t done it.

Anything I write in this caption will be more words than what I wrote under the description.

6) “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux”

This is about a guy walking around.  That is all I have managed to gather about this thing.

Even the music on this thing is better than the show.

            7) “The Walking Dead: Season Two”

            I talked about the first one being a masterpiece of storytelling (except for chapter 3) and I have put off actually playing this thing for freaking ever.  I no idea why.  Two of my buddies played it in tandem and invited me to watch it but I foolishly blew them off expecting to have played it on my own time.

            This is kind of where that lethargy toward zombies was really kicking in.  I had been giving the TV show a shot at this point (what a piece of shit) and this could just wait.

            I think it is pretty clear that I have allowed way too many god damn games pile up in my Steam library and have not done enough to actually take advantage of owning them the way I took advantage of how easy they were to purchase.  This is the problem I think with some online shopping that lots of people fall into, when you have instant access to something you want on an impulse and those impulses are stimulated frequently by sales, special offers, or just more content being released it feeds that squirrel part of the brain that just collects and hordes hunts until your squirrel hard drive looks like an overstuffed red bar.

            What games have you been looking forward to playing but haven’t had the time or the drive to actually hit “start”?  Or are there any games you only played for an hour before setting down?  Not because they were bad, just because you had other shit to do and it could wait.  And they continue to wait.  Please comment.

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