New Year's Resolution

My New Year's resolution is to play more videogames. What about you?

Seriously! My days go to work and being a dad, my evenings go to watching TV with my wife, and the queue of games I want to play has been stacking up and up. I manage to get in some tabletop roleplaying every week, by scheduling it ... and I guess that's what I'm going to have to do to catch up on my videogame backlog. Schedule a night of the week for some official videogame time. I worry a little that making it a regimen will take the fun out, but hopefully if I'm not having fun I'll just move on to the next game. I've got a lot on the list...

In other news, we're back from Ashland, Oregon, where my parents' internet was pretty sketchy - (what kind of internet would you get for a place where you only live a month or two out of the year?) - hence the lack of updating. But over the holidays, got in some co-op Portal 2, Lego Harry Potter, and King of Tokyo. (And some Frog Fractions this morning! Forget GTA, Frog Fractions is the true omni-game.) What did y'all play?

Comments

[Brett Douville]

I've managed to finish 17 AAA level titles in 2012, all from my fairly deep back catalog, and I've been blogging the lessons from them over on the blog, generally only from the games that have a strong positive experience (for example, I finished a game recently that had such serious polish issues that the biggest lesson to take from it was "polish is important" -- it's hard to imagine a game being shipped with the sorts of issues they had now). In general, even these older games, which are approximately a decade old now, have lots to teach still, and it's been an interesting experience thinking about what works in them for me.

The best of the bunch was definitely the original PS2 release of Rez, which is just a fantastically designed little game -- only five levels of this synaesthesiac shooter, but the tweaks to the design to make revisiting levels appealing are a real surprise and delight. I also really enjoyed my time with Shadow of Destiny (a strange little adventure game) and Wild Arms 3 (a JRPG which really hooked me with its look and play).

Happy New Year, Jamie, to all of you there at the Labs.

[Scott Petrovic]

I just played some King of Tokyo over the holidays for the first time. My brother is big into different board games. We must have played at least 10 rounds of it.In the video game crazed culture, it is good to have some pen and paper type games out there.

[Brett Douville]

King of Tokyo! Great choice. I bought it for one of my sons for his birthday this past summer and we loved it, we've played a bunch of times. We have a couple new ones from the holidays to try out, too.