I haven’t had a lot to write about lately, for several reasons: first, and most importantly, I tend to prioritize work over my hobbies, but then in addition I’ve developed several new hobbies that don’t lend themselves as much to this weblog (“And then, when I painted the 1/72 scale Carthaginian infantry, I used turquoise as the dominant accent color!”)
One thing that I find is interesting is that I’ve played no console games in nearly two months. I’m back to playing PC games all the time, something I swore once that I’d never do again. I’ve decided that this has more to do with how my house is arranged at the moment, and with the season — the room with the PC is warmer — but I’m curious to know if other people go through cycles like this as well. Put simply, over the past few years I’ve noticed that I play console games in the summer, and PC games in the winter. I have no idea why this is. It’s not a rational choice, it’s just the pattern I’ve gotten in to.
The particular games I’ve been playing are ones that I don’t actually have time to play: a political article by Barrett Brown casually mentioned Morrowind, which made me want to play it again. So that gave me a few days of both Morrowind and Oblivion on Steam, followed by Gothic 2 (mostly, and a teeny bit of Gothic 1, which seemed more interesting, actually) via Good Old Games. It’s still striking to me how much more fully realized and natural the world of Morrowind seems to me than its prettier, much more successful successor. Although, to be fair, the impressive number of user-generated add-ons and enhancements helps a lot in this regard.
The game’s also a lot easier when you’ve played it for so many years that you no longer feel guilty about cheating past the parts that are too hard.
I’ve been a bit down on the console lately. Partly because the thing has moved to the basement. But mostly because the game season this year has been filled with a lot of big games that had a lot of hype but were ultimately shallow or boring or shallow and boring, or boring and cliched.
I’d play on the PC if I had one that was always booted to Windows. But then I’d be running a Windows machine and I’d have to kill myself. I prefer to wait until VMware is fast enough to play old games.