pauraque | Entries tagged with gaming

kitarella_imagines asked: ( What were the: Happiest/Saddest/Funniest/Scariest times of your life? )

maidenjedi asked (and

arcanetrivia seconded): ( What got you into birdwatching? And where would you most like to go to do more of this, specifically which birds you haven't seen in person would be most interesting to see? )

ambyr asked: ( What's one place you miss from the Bay Area? )

mrissa asked: ( What are you looking forward to? )

de_eekhoorn asked: ( What is your favorite anecdote? )

lilacsigil asked: ( What bird that you have seen do you think should be more widely known and/or valued? )

Okay, this was more questions than I was expecting! Thank you! Here are the first six, I'll work on the rest later.

sixbeforelunch asked: ( What's the best game you've played recently (define 'best' and 'recent' however you like)? )

yarnofariadne asked: ( What extinct bird would you most like to have seen? )

octahedrite asked: ( What's your favorite fictional creature? (along the lines of dragons, rocs, etc) )

lightofdaye asked: ( What are your oldest and newest fandoms? )

lilysea asked: ( What languages are you learning, and what made you choose them? )

senmut asked: ( What, in your opinion, was the video game that hooked you into perusing them into adult hood? )

In 2025 I posted reviews of 44 games, of which 10 were replays, 1 was a revision of an old review, and 33 were games I hadn't played before.

( and here they are )

(I made sure to number them because when I went back to number my book post I realized I had shorted myself four books! It was actually 51!)

My ongoing gaming side-quest is to play games from different countries. This year my new countries were Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Peru, the Philippines, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan, bringing my total to 28. (At least the way I'm counting. I realize that "what is a country?" is a fraught question, but it's also a question that's way above my pay grade so I'm trying not to sweat it for such a low-stakes project.) My list of potential games to play includes 31 more countries. There are still lots and lots that I haven't yet identified a game for, including some seemingly low-hanging fruit, but since I'm keeping it to titles that would be of interest to me outside this project, the search for options can take longer.

My game list is a bit silly right now because I decided to add every game I could remember playing... ever. I love revisiting childhood games, and I enjoy searching for obscure titles and figuring out how to get them to run, so I'm okay with the list just being long. I actually do think it is possible, in principle, for me to review every game I played as a child, while attempting to do the same for books would be totally absurd. I've read a lot more books than I've played games, I started reading at a younger age, and I think I'm much less likely to forget a game than a book simply because I have a strong visual memory. Anyway, for future reference (I know I'll want to know next year) I currently have 280 games on my list.

Of the games I played for the first time in 2025, my favorites include: Until Then, Disco Elysium, Engare, I Did Not Buy This Ticket, The Last Door, and The Drifter.

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

The Midway
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Well, since you asked. :P

I've played video games for as long as I can remember. My dad was an early adopter of technology and he brought home an IBM clone in the late 1980s, when I was in grade school. He would download tons of games from BBSes for my brother and me. Sometimes these were pirated games from big companies, but this was also a huge heyday for what we would now call "indie" games—stuff coded by one guy in his basement or a couple of college students in the computer lab. Platformers, shooters, puzzle games, arcade clones, roguelikes, RPGs, text adventures, you name it, we played it. Often we didn't know what a game even was until we ran it, because while the original BBS post might have explained what it was, all we saw was an EXE filename that was limited to eight characters.

I think gaming was always social for me. Some of the early games my brother and I played did have hot-seat multiplayer (alternating who's sitting at the keyboard) but if it was a single-player game we'd just take turns, and shamelessly order each other around if we thought the other wasn't playing it right. XD When I got a little older and more of my friends started to have computers or consoles at home, inviting people over to play games was a huge thing. I was just recently reminiscing about going over to my friend's house to play Myst, which was a massive phenomenon in 1993. We were young and the logic puzzles were too hard for us, so it would just degenerate into heckling the game and each other until we collapsed in hysterical laughter. That's still one of my favorite gaming memories... and I still don't think I've ever actually beaten Myst.

( cut for length )

In 2024 I made posts about 54 games, of which 16 were replays, 4 were revisions of old reviews, 3 were expansions or DLCs, and 31 were games I'd never played before.

( and here they are [insert Mario Kart trophy music] )

That was a lot of games! And yet my list of games to get to has ballooned to a ludicrous size, in part because I got the idea in my head that it would be fun to play games from as many different countries as possible, and also because I decided to add every game from my childhood that I could remember playing. You could argue that this represents a healthy balance of branching out into new experiences while making space for what's cozy and familiar. Or you could equally argue that I've gone nuts. Even after going through and culling some titles that I'm not really interested in or couldn't even remember why I'd added them, the list currently sits at 243 games. o_O I don't know how this is going to go, but I'll just say that my goal is to end 2025 with a shorter list, not a longer one.

Of the games I played for the first time in 2024, my favorites were Secret Little Haven (trans visual novel), ABZÛ (underwater exploration), The Case of the Golden Idol (deduction mystery), The Telwynium (point-and-click adventure), Outlanders (town builder), Terraria (survival crafting), and Outer Wilds (sci-fi exploration). Which is a pretty good spread of genres, now that I look at it!

I have played every World of Warcraft expansion, at least a little, since the game came out. I've never reviewed any of them, in part because I don't think this type of game lends itself very well to reviewing. A lot of the experience is about long-term character progression through complex interlocking systems that are constantly being revised, such that you kind of don't know if the current iteration of the game is good until you've played it long enough that it's too late to tell anyone that the third major content patch of the ninth expansion was great, actually! Because now it's over and you're not going to know if the next iteration is good until you've played it.

NPC talks about regaining 'aspectral' power — *That's not a word, Alex*

So, Dragonflight is over now, and this is not a review, it's a retrospective of my experience playing an iteration of the game that no longer exists. As such, it's mostly for me, but you can read it if you want to do that for some reason!

( Read more... )

I haven't had much time to play lately, but yesterday I fired up World of Warcraft to participate in the annual Running of the Trolls, a community-run charity event benefiting the Trevor Project, an organization which operates a crisis hotline for LGBTQ youth in the US. (The "trolls" are an in-game species, chosen here for their bright colors, not a reference to trolling!)

It works just like a real life charity walk/run. The group gathers where new troll characters are created and takes about an hour to run across the game world and through the cities, raising awareness and collecting donations for this good cause. This year we raised over $3500 USD!

hundreds of players gather on a beach

Hundreds of players turned out for the event. This was the crowd at the starting line. (Sorry for the potato-quality screenshots; I had to turn the graphics way down or else that many players in one place would have made my PC explode!)

( More screenshots )

It's not too late to make a donation if you're able!

We actually had our family Christmas three days ago due to the limitations of our kid's schedule, followed by a weekend of infinite holiday baking and extended-family get-togethers, the last of which I missed because I threw out my back somehow (hurray for reaching an age when it's possible to injure myself rolling out cookie dough too vigorously) but the rest was good. My back still hurts but it's getting better.

My Christmas gift excitement: For a long time I had been bemoaning the fact that I got rid of my Nintendo 64 when I moved here many years ago. I'm usually more of a PC gamer, but there are some N64 games that are among my all-time favorites.

walgesang can take a hint and she got me a new console and some games to restart the collection. ♥♥♥ I might have already logged 8+ hours on Banjo-Tooie (after the ritual blowing into the cartridge and cleaning the contacts with rubbing alcohol, of course).

I hope those of you who celebrate are also having a good holiday!

And for my last trick, I will fill the 'rough body play' and 'immobilization/mummification' squares on my card with some words and moving pictures about those two things in The Curse of Monkey Island.

Though I hit several of the major plot points, there are no actual gameplay spoilers that tell you how to solve the puzzles (I mean, the game's 16 years old, but you never know), and all is G-rated and worksafe.

( The Cursed Ring )