A curmudgeon writes.
Working through the pile of shame.
Today was the day I finished playing Borderlands 2.
Well, let me clarify. It’s the day I finished the main story and reached the New Game Plus mode. It’s a point I’ve reached after playing on and off since before Christmas, and according to Steam’s inbuilt counter, I’ve spent just over 100 hours reaching this point.
That’s four-and-a-bit days straight. Continue reading “Farewell, Handsome Jack!”
So as I did last year, I’m going to take a look at what sort of non-food things I consumed throughout the previous year. That is, books, music, films, games and stuff. As before, I’m also uncertain whether this will be of any interest to anyone other than nerdy ole me, but I hope you will enjoy, particularly if data recording is a bit of a thing for you. Because, as you certainly should have gleaned from sticking around here, it is for me.
(I have been told this is all a bit Patrick Bateman. I disagree: I save my discussions of the work of Phil Collins for facetime.)
Continue reading “2015 Consumption: A Look at Some Stuff I Liked”
I’ve just finished – well, in the early hours of the morning – Dreampainters’ game Anna. The timing was probably pretty suitable because it’s considered a survival horror, though really it’s better described as some manner of walking simulator set in an increasingly weird sawmill.
The story is fairly twisted and unclear – it follows the death of a woman named Anna (yes, she of the title), whose relation to you is as yet unclear. It becomes more clear through the game, though not much more, as madness is a bit of a feature, and there’s not really any such thing as a reliable narrator here.
The Extended version features a possible eight endings, which increase in terrible-ness as the game continues. So it’s possible to NOPE out of the game soon after solving a desultory door-opening puzzle and receive what amounts to the ‘good’ ending, while pursuing the story to its end guarantees a Pretty Bad Time. Continue reading “Don’t go into that sawmill: some thoughts on Anna”
When I recently wrote up my experience of playing through a number of Valve games, I mentioned that I had thought Portal 2 had overdone it and wasn’t as good as its predecessor, the clean and slim Portal.
Having just completed Portal 2 on a second playthrough – commenced, weirdly, a year to the day that I first played it – I have to say that past me is a dick. Or, maybe I just needed to play it close on the sprung heels of the first to figure out how great it is. Continue reading “Portal 2 (2011)”
There’s a certain perverse joy found in killing digital zombies. They’re people, but they’re monsters, so it’s OK to annihilate them because if you don’t, you become one. Fair enough.
It’s something that’s fuelled a lot of games of late, but nowhere perhaps more enjoyably than in the rejig of The House of the Dead: Overkill called The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, which I picked up for cheap on Steam a while ago, but have only just been able to move to the top of Mount Backlog for its moment in the wintry sun. (I figured I needed a break from crowbars and headcrabs.)
The main attraction of the game is that it is fantastically over the top, even by the fairly low-culture standards of zombie media. Basically, it’s presented as an adults-only grindhouse-style series of films, with all the out-of-focus film, bad sound and clichés which go with the territory.
Yep, down to the Intermission sign. Continue reading “The Typing of the Dead: Overkill”
I’ve been playing through a couple of Valve’s games over the past few months. They’ve taken longer than I expected due to, you know, Life, but I’ve enjoyed them enough to consider posting some thoughts about them.
The games have been played as part of my ongoing attempt to minimise my frankly terrifying to-play list. It spans generations of consoles and about the past two decades of PC gaming, so there’s more than enough to be going on with. The PC playing has ramped up in the past little while as I built my own computer and now can play modern games at at least the native resolution of my lounge TV, with all bells and whistles on.
Continue reading “Recent gaming: Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and Portal”
Today marked my first completion of a game on my newly-built Steambox.
(Catch-up: Steam is a very successful online games marketplace/management tool which I’ve successfully used to enable a virtual hoarding proclivity while simultaneously ameliorating my physical collection, so win-win I suppose. Anyway, the company is in the process of creating PCs for the lounge-room – called Steamboxes – and I recently built one of my own which, miraculously, didn’t catch fire. It’s named after Stephenson’s Rocket.)
The game I completed was Leviathan: The Old City, which has copped a lot of stick for being nothing more than a walking simulator. Continue reading “Exploring The Old City”
Sydney’s holding a St Patrick’s Day parade today so it’s fitting that I finished my playthrough of The Saboteur today. Or, as I like to think of it, Paddy O’Guinness Kills Nazis, Sees Boobs.
Heard of it? I didn’t think so. It was pretty quickly forgotten, even by the standards of derivative sandbox shooters. But there was a reasonable mix of Continue reading “The luck of the Irish”
It’s a new year, and for me that’s as good a time as any to look at what I did last year. More specifically, to look at my consumption of books, music, games and stuff over the past year. I’m not certain it’s interesting to anyone other than myself, but given that I’m a stats nerd – odd for someone who was definitively crap at them during my university years – and because I’m into recording stuff. What I’ve listened to. What I’ve read. What movies I’ve seen. Et cetera. Some of the data’s incomplete but it’s a reasonable portrait I suppose. This’ll be a long one.
Music
I record most of my listening on last.fm, as I have done for years now. For ten years, this year. Basically, any time I play something on my computer – which, at work, is where I listen to most of my music anyway – or now, on my iPhone, it’ll send a record of it to my profile. I try to record the stuff I listen to at home – usually with this thing – but far less reliably. Given it’s been running for the longest of any recording I’ve done, there’ll be more data here to work from.
It’s a useful source of information – the sidebar listing what I’m listening to comes from last.fm data – and provides enough statistics to keep me happy. For example, the counter on my profile tells me that since 2005, I’ve listened to 132,000 tracks, more or less.
But how did I fare last year? Well, here’s a graphical representation of my top artists for 2014:
As to how those listens were distributed, there’s this helpful chart – which you’ll have to click to read, undoubtedly.
Continue reading “2014 consumption: a look at some stuff I liked”Otherwise known as James Ellroy: The Game.
Ah, I kid. Sorta. L.A. Noire is pretty indebted to Ellroy’s canon. It’s a mostly historically-accurate presentation of downtown LA in the 1940s, with some not-so-accurate versions of famous faces attached. It’s dark, long, a bit convoluted and full of wonkiness – but it’s as compulsive and endearing as any crime novel, largely because you’re made to feel that you’re in one.
We’re talking Los Angeles at the time of the Elizabeth Short killing. Corrupt cops, the birth of the freeway system, returned soldiers and streets awash with drugs and booze. There’s detailed clothing, excellent cars and bystanders who jump out of the way of your terrible driving with a spirited “Holy Toledo!”, while the movie plays on film noir tropes like there’s no tomorrow. Continue reading “L.A. Noire (2011)”
Yeah nah. 