{"id":3016,"date":"2016-12-29T12:36:23","date_gmt":"2016-12-29T17:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=3016"},"modified":"2016-12-29T12:36:23","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T17:36:23","slug":"play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=3016","title":{"rendered":"Play"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My greatest preoccupation? Games. I play games always. My opinion changes monthly, even daily, on whether games stand on their own as literature, or as social dialogue, or as true escape from the drudgery of life. After all, games can tell the most interactive and compelling stories (though they usually don&#8217;t), they can inspire people to understand one another (though they usually don&#8217;t), and they can transport someone away from their typical trudge through an unending barrage of tasks and demands from outdated systems (though they usually don&#8217;t).<\/p>\n<p>I present here a list of games I played in the month of December, and what they held for me.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Pillars of Eternity &#8211;<\/strong> A throwback to the party-driven, turn-based dungeon crawls that revolutionized gameplay in my college years, PoE echoes some of the best writing of games like Planescape: Torment and the Baldur&#8217;s Gate series, while updating the game to play a little more like modern work. A mix of story and tactics, with lots of optional reading, and enough voice acting to keep it from becoming stale.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Kid Icarus &#8211;<\/strong> A NES classic which I rented several times but could never decipher. In this era of increasing difficulty, it actually plays like a primitive Dark Souls, with equal levels of frustration. I want to defeat it, and the simplicity of the gameplay deceives me into thinking it will happen.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Unepic &#8211;<\/strong> A Metroidvania-style platformer\u00c2\u00a0of surprising depth, Unepic also has a Dark Souls feel, but with a cornball, nerdy sense of humor. The criticism that the protagonist is unlikable is apt, but the game has surprised me many times, and that happens so rarely, that I have boosted this game&#8217;s rating in my mind to an A+.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mistfall &#8211;<\/strong> This board game throttles me regularly. I can play solo \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and I had to, just to learn the rules \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but even with my considerable abilities in dungeon crawling, I have yet to succeed even once on its tutorial level. I still come back for more punishment, a credit to the game&#8217;s designers.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Guillotine -\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>I have to hand it to this game&#8217;s designers: everyone likes this game. I have grown weary of it, having had to play it with so many people in this last month. While it has remarkable depth for its simple mechanics \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and I truly admire that \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it simply holds no real challenge for me. I can&#8217;t tell whether the randomness deadens the fun, or whether I just can&#8217;t cope with people who can&#8217;t see all their options within a few seconds, or who hold winning in such high regard that they plan for too long in a game that demands so little.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mansions of Madness, Second Edition<\/strong> &#8211; I have so much to say about this, not because the game itself inspires verbosity, but because it is the first game I have played which utilizes what I think will be the only game play in the future, and I have mixed feelings about it. Should a board game be a video game? I honestly don&#8217;t know.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Invisible, Inc.<\/strong> &#8211; This reminds me of the Shadowrun game for the Sega Genesis, which I always loved; however, I think I will get tired of the procedural generation of it. I love rogue-likes and rogue-lites, but the game started with such an awesome story, and gave me X-Com in a more appealing style for my tastes, that I want the\u00c2\u00a0meat to be cooked a little more carefully, rather than simply McDonald&#8217;s-style churning out of missions. Is replayability more important than first-play?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve played some other things, too, but they all sort of fall into the headings above, so I&#8217;m going to go shower now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My greatest preoccupation? Games. I play games always. My opinion changes monthly, even daily, on whether games stand on their own as literature, or as social dialogue, or as true escape from the drudgery of life. After all, games can tell the most interactive and compelling stories (though they usually don&#8217;t), they can inspire people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s73iP8-play","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":244,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=244","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":0},"title":"Oh Mr Belpit, your legs are so swollen.","date":"2\/13\/2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The ntoskrnl of my games PC has gone tits up, so to speak. I spent most of my weekend trying to correct it without losing gads of data, all the while attempting to deal with power supply and XP issues on the Frankenstein machine I created for my aunt. All\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Ennui&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":697,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=697","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":1},"title":"I&#8217;ve beaten half the games on this list.","date":"12\/3\/2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Because I did not have a girlfriend until I was 17, really. And video games lasted longer than sex anyway. Old School Video Games that bitch-slapped my peers and me. Because back then they made video games to resemble life. They got harder and harder and faster and faster until\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Ennui&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"\/images\/blog\/force_you_have_none.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":124,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=124","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":2},"title":"Where you been spending your nights?","date":"5\/5\/2004","format":false,"excerpt":"I've had my second brush with the realism of the war in Iraq. A friend of a friend of a brother of Most-Honoured Girlfriend is a soldier in the USMC. He shipped off last weekend and as a send-off, he asked if we could all get together and play LAN\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;For the geek in you&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":753,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=753","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":3},"title":"I ain&#8217;t playin&#8217;.","date":"6\/4\/2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I would never complain about this, but it's very strange that lately jobs have been falling at my feet. A colleague of mine in a couple of shows now, Jackie, made mention of this at one point. She was mildly irritated and said something along the lines of \"People just\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Self-service&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2948,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=2948","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":4},"title":"Good video games","date":"8\/15\/2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a journal prompt to make a list. So, here are 5\u00c2\u00a0video games to which I refer often when people ask me if video games are art (actually, they never ask that; they just ask what my favorites are. This is mostly in descending order of awesome. Mostly. Undertale\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Ennui&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2785,"url":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/?p=2785","url_meta":{"origin":3016,"position":5},"title":"Your Daily Digest: Dark Souls","date":"12\/14\/2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Video games are a bit of a double-edged sword for me. I strongly advocate their presence in the arts, as they can represent the finest in agency-driven art. One's\u00c2\u00a0necessary presence in a well-written, well-made video game inspires a type of catharsis akin to the best in theatre. In a world\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Ennui&quot;","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3017,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3016\/revisions\/3017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.steelbuddha.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}