The Video Game Revue

Game Meanderings

There are a few people at work who know enough about me that they occasionally ask me what I've been playing lately in the hope of hearing some kind of amusingly esoteric answer. Once it was Disciples II, once it was Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden, once it was Daisenryaku VII, once it was Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, once it was X3: Reunion, and once it was IL2: Sturnovik. Those are all since the start of 2008. One time I answered with something completely mundane like Mercenaries 2 and drew a decisively disappointed reaction.

Yesterday was one of those glorious "random gaming days" that helps to solidify my reputation as somebody who plays a lot of games seemingly at random. There's not much rhyme or reason to what I choose to play--I just get a gaming itch that needs to be scratched, and sometimes it leads me in chaotic directions.

Things started out innocently enough with a desire to play Team Fortress 2, which I did for the better part of an hour. I had a great time playing primarily Soldier and Medic, with occasional forays into Demo and Heavy. When I had had my TF2 fill, I briefly considered playing some Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, or Unreal Tournament 3, but something a little less common caught my eye.

It is strange for me to contemplate now that although I was a total addict of id Software games back in the mid 90s, it wasn't until later that I was old enough to afford copies of most of them. As a consequence of this, for the longest time the only id Software games I had were copies of Quake, Quake II, and Quake III: Arena without any of the expansion packs. When the id Super Pack was released on Steam, I officially filled in all of the blanks.

Because of this, I happened to have a copy of Quake III Team Arena kicking around that I'd never actually played. And so it came to pass that yesterday I had my first duel against Fritzkrieg, the Q3A bot that is, not my buddy who goes by the same alias. Although the graphics are dated and the gameplay feels awkward now that I'm accustomed to more modern FPSes, Q3A has aged well and I probably could have played that for the remainder of the day if I'd really wanted to.

World of Warcraft interjected for a little bit and then I took a break. I'm pretty sure I also played Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on PS3... or was that the night before? I remember contemplating Dead Space at one point, but I ended up playing GTA IV instead. Then Fritzkrieg came over and the Little Big Planet started.

LBP would have dominated the remainder of the day, and for Fritzkrieg it did, but at some point I got tired and passed the controller off to Sunny. I then decided to fire up some old SNES games.

I nearly started playing F-Zero but quickly switched to Donkey Kong Country (and got my ass handed to me by the barrel canyon stage). Following that was a fair sized helping of Super Mario All-Stars, which segued into a taste of Seiken Densetsu 3, and I finished off the night with a bit of Chrono Trigger.

Days like that make it hard to go to work in the morning.

posted by Parappa @ 10:26 AM