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Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

Old Man (Board) Gamer: Diversionary Tactics

Posted in Gaming, tagged , , , , , on 10 Sep 2020| 2 Comments »

If you don’t mind, I’ll take a break from past ruminations on third-party voting, COVID, and the goals of liberalism, and instead will recommend to you something that has given us hours of distraction and enjoyment through 2020’s interminable summer.

As you might have guessed from this post’s headline, it’s a game. Of sorts.

It’s not a classic board game—you can only play it once and there is no board—and it’s not an “escape room” type game, either. Rather, it’s a mashup of puzzles and ciphers, clues and characters, documents and artifacts, all wrapped in a murder mystery for you to solve in a month-by-month collection of physical and virtual communication.

It is Hunt-A-Killer, and it is a ton of fun.

(more…)

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Out of the Fray

Posted in Gaming, Hi Tech, tagged , , , , on 02 Jul 2020| 2 Comments »

I spent the last week at war.

In the wee hours, late last week, I awoke to email alerts regarding my personal Facebook account. It had been disabled.

My first thought was that one of my more political posts had rubbed someone the wrong way and they’d reported me, but as I investigated, I learned that, no, someone had gained access to my account and had done something that violated Community Standards.

I’d been hacked.

I tried to recover control, but Facebook’s algorithms denied me and summarily deactivated my account. This also deactivated the “author” page I ran on Facebook, where I echo posts from here. As far as Facebook was concerned, I was a non-entity. (more…)

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Old Man Gamer: VR Edition

Posted in Gaming, tagged , , , , , on 21 May 2020| 2 Comments »

Back in January, we received a small monetary bonus, so I decided, Hey, what the hell, I’m gonna try one of these new-fangled VR gaming headsets.

Being a wearer of spectacles, though, I had concerns. There was a chance they simply wouldn’t work for me, so I tried one at the mall, watched YouTube videos, read many reviews, browsed the forums, and carefully parsed return policies. Weighing pros and cons, I made a decision and bought one. It was on backorder, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

That was in January.

Then the world fell down, and I forgot all about it. (more…)

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Old Man (Board) Gamer—We Did a Thing

Posted in Gaming, tagged , , on 03 Jan 2020| 2 Comments »

The holidays are over and my brain is filled with rants—how to mount a meaningful boycott, and the ramifications of foreign policy when performed by amateurs, to name two—but each time I started a post on one of them I stopped myself. I’m pretty sure regular readers don’t want to hear about that—not from me, anyway—so I’m moving on to something completely different.

Over the holiday break, my neighbor and I did a thing.

We made a game. (more…)

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Old Man Gamer: Borderlands 3

Posted in Gaming, tagged , , , on 16 Sep 2019| 4 Comments »

Miss me? OK, probably not. (If you did, *mwah*.)

Regardless, I failed to meet last week’s self-imposed deadline because I did something that I said I was no longer going to do: I bought a first-day-release version of a video game.

I’ve been burned by the hype of Release Day versions, most notably No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76. For those two, I either stuck with the game through months of patches and updates (NMS), or I dropped it like a hot rock within a fortnight of fighting patches and incredibly bad design (F76). Those two reactions pretty much describe the trendline of my frustration with the beta versions that game studios now peddle as consumer-ready fare. I mean, you should not load up a brand new game on the day of its release only to have a 5GB patch begin downloading. That’s just nuts, but it’s indicative of the high-stakes meat-grinders that game studios have become.

However, when I heard that Borderlands, the irreverent dystopic sci-fi shoot-n-loot franchise, was coming out with a third major installment, (and in my book, there have been only two Borderlands games, as the “pre-sequel” and the spinoffs had neither the charm nor the playability of installments 1 and 2), I could not help myself and pre-ordered myself toward what I hoped and prayed would not be another Release Day filled with frustration and tears. (more…)

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Old Man (Board) Gamer: Wu Wei

Posted in Gaming, tagged , , , , , on 14 Nov 2018| Leave a Comment »

It’s November, which means a lot of the Kickstarter projects I backed are shipping. Kickstarter game projects are kind of a crap shoot: most are good, a few are bad, and a select few are excellent. Mostly, I’m attracted to games with new or unusual mechanisms of game-play, or with interesting thematic content.

First to arrive, this season, is Wu Wei: Journey of the Changing Path, from Gray Wolf Games.  It had both an interesting set of mechanisms and a deep thematic content. The fact that it’s also bloody gorgeous and of the highest production quality, well, that’s gravy. (more…)

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Old Man (Board) Gamer: Gloomhaven

Posted in Culture, Gaming, tagged , , , , , , on 01 Feb 2018| 1 Comment »

Last year I got a small bonus, and I used it to buy a couple of board games in the “luxury” class (e.g., priced at $100 or more).

The first purchase, Mansions of Madness, was a huge disappointment, as the replayability and the number of supplied scenarios didn’t justify the higher price.

Unfortunately, I was unable to review my second purchase, Gloomhaven, as the release date was repeatedly extended. I ordered it back in March 2017, but the release was pushed out to August, September, November, and then December, but finally it shipped in early January of this year.

It was worth the wait.

(more…)

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