It was an interesting weekend in gaming (for me)
Having infinity jobs and being a parent, there’s not a lot of downtime for games and such. I have three games on my phone I play regularly, which are mostly asynchronous or Tamagotchi-like, and I have the occasional time to play something fun on multiple gaming systems I never get to use. I don’t accomplish a lot unfortunately, and the past decade has seen me kicked out of guilds due to kid illness, passing out and sleeping through meetings because my kid was up all night, and yeah… gaming’s something I was really good at and in to a while back and now I play single player games because even when I am in a head to head a kid’s going to interrupt me.
tl;dr – old dad gamer writes about some weekend gaming accomplishments that mean little to anyone other than him.
Not been a lot of accomplishments the past few years until this weekend.. I happened to be testing out a couple of projectors head to head with a gaming system and a confluence of events conspired to all come down in a 24 hour period to make me feel like a winner.
We’ll start with the phone games and work my way up.
Text Express – done
There’s a game called Text Express… it’s your standard word plate game with a story mode behind it and a minor amount of strategy involved to progress. Basically you time your play for maximum experience, and you choose your location for missions for upgrade abilities, and you use your knowledge of the language to win the levels. You are rewarded with a story… it’s not a particularly great story, I feel like it was written by an AI trying to write a train story as a fairy tale in the style of Kings Quest, but whatever.
Yesterday I maxed out the levels and completed the stories… whoo hoo, my asynchronous game I have completed… until they add more to the story… sort of ends on a cliffhanger at the moment as a person goes off to battle some angry chicken monsters while cleaning up the protagonist’s mess.
This win/end was unexpected… but there’s really nothing more to do other than side quest stuff until more story is added.
Mob Control – piggied
There’s a game by Voodoo called Mob Control. It’s a game I’ve joked with my kids about how much skill it takes. This was before the latest updates when I would figure out where to put my thumb and just beat level after level after level. They fixed that a while ago but it’s still a pretty easy game and I use it mostly just to zone out while still feeling like I’m making some progress.
I had the idea I was going to be the number one player on the planet at one point. Unfortunately I believe several thousand other people had this goal as well. After an absurd amount of time put in I’m still 3300 from the lead position in the Immortal League (highest as far as I can tell,) and slowing down…
However, in the weekend games, I’m still #1 and have beat 49 other players for the past couple of months… which gets me 200 stars and somewhat closer to being the best… I suspect most of the top 1000 are doing exactly the same and I will not manage to break that unless hundreds give up. Womp womp.
Stray (ps5)
Stray is a game where you play a stray cat and wander through a post-apocalyptic robot-inhabited city that’s become a prison for all involved. Along the way you do cat things such as knock mugs off of shelves, destroy carpets, trip people, sleep on laps, jump into boxes (far too infrequently,) and of course wear a special control vest so a human trapped in a robot body can communicate through you.
Yesterday finished it.
I really don’t know what I think about this game. Some of it was incredibly fun, but near the end the story I just didn’t care. There had been a couple of interesting logic puzzles in the game but not nearly enough. Some fun action sequences but also, not particularly a lot. You’re ostensibly doing this mission for someone or for a few of the robots and the city but… there just doesn’t feel like much of a compelling reason.
You also can’t puke hairballs which totally ruins the experience.
God of War Ragnarök
This is more just a persona achievement – I hit a boss monster. I couldn’t beat it and I’m trying to clear out the side missions on one of the levels because I suspect at 47 hours in I’m getting close to the end of the game and need to level up some. I wasn’t having fun, and I wasn’t where I wanted to be.
I decided finally I was going to go to accessibility settings and set the miniboss checkpoints to on. This is cheating basically, but I’d hit a wall for a couple of days and had been defeated and there was not much left to explore or do on that level and yeah… decided it was time to cheat or give up for a while…
Turned on miniboss checkpoints, went back in to battle the boss, and this time I defeated him fair and square… it had clicked in my head… was not my cheat attempts, was actual skill. I mean, now I’ve probably ruined some ending by having enabled that but yeah… personal victory right as I gave up.
Womp womp?
Who knows… turned it back off but I suspect whatever achievement I could have gotten for not enabling that probably gone.
