Well I’m off my third of three days off, and I’ve done jack shit with the first two. Starting tomorrow I work six days out of seven so if I want to get my gaming in, I’d better do it today. This is day two without weed – three if you’re not counting Sunday, when I was out of bud and hit the resin all day – but I got ten hours of sleep last night and have had no withdrawal; I have minimal nausea even with my autistoid gastrointestinal tract. I switched from half-ounces of top-shelf stuff to a full ounce of middies, and for a compulsive smoker (compulsion to smoke rather than to get high) it’s a godsend because you’re not incapacitated for the first few days. The mids lasted about one-and-a-half times as long as the top-shelf, at about the same price, and I could still smoke a joint and get super stoned at the end of the bag, tolerance be damned, because it’s good joint weed. Anyway I’m just recommending this if you don’t want to be as much of a pothead but still enjoy the smoke. I plan to wait a bit before buying a new bag because I’ve hit the big 200lb from too much grocery store fried chicken and pints of ice cream from the munchies. (For context, I used to be 181cm and 181lb.)

BUT ANYWAY I need to get my game on today. Weekdays off are usually Let’s Make a Deal, The Price is Right, The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful middays and then whatever. I can eliminate the daytime game shows so hopefully I’ll be able to play a bit.

SO:

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey: One of the most recent games I play (2018), very playable though even so, I’m collecting parts for a new computer (about 2/3 of the way done, I just have the graphics card, RAM, case, and Windows to go, plus a 2TB hard drive that I plan to put into my current one before I take it to a thrift shop. Without it, the computer would only have 500GB of storage, 200GB or so of which is taken up by Windows). In many ways it’s a great game but it’s very modern, with voice acting, cutscenes, amazing graphics, all that. It’s set in ancient Greece but the voice acting uses Modern Greek pronunciation; it’s unnerving to hear characters at the time of Thermypolae (sp? I’ve never actually written it out) talking about “drak-mee” instead of drachmae (drakh-mai, with kh being the first sound in Channukah or “loch”)*. Good little action-adventure game, maybe action-RPG but the lines have gotten blurred over the decades since I’ve tried to categorize a game. If you’re into historical stuff you can’t go wrong with this series.

• oops, actually in classical times, chi was pronounced as an aspirated K, not “kh”, which sound it would take in Hellenistic times. But it’s still closer than “drak-mee”

Avernum: Escape from the Pit: Still lost in this one, though I haven’t played it very much since I last posted about it. I’ve totally lost momentum, though once I take an hour or two to get back on track, I should be, well, back on track. The easiest way might be to check out the job board in one of the cities I haven’t even been in yet (there’s one between the Tower of Magi and the Castle). I got the Orb of Thalni (using it is really lame) and I think my most recent save is at Erika’s Tower. Another one of those games you sort of set aside after you’ve played it for a bit but with an end nowhere in sight. I plan to finish at least one quest in this game, preferably all three. I got the orders to kill the emperor; that’s all I remember (don’t remember from whom).

Conquests of Camelot: Search for the Grail: A Sierra adventure game where you’re King Arthur and you have to find, duh, the Grail. Late ’80s SCI game, still with a text-based interface (think the early King’s Quests rather than the point-and-click series – Conquests of the Longbow, its successor, is fully point-and-click, and I want to play that soon). It’s a pretty small game; at the outset it makes it look like there are dozens of locations in England alone but only three are accessible before you go to Gaza and talk to a guy who tells you a lot of stuff that you need to write down so I decided to come back later, and I haven’t yet. Fun game, though limited by its era. I’ve decided to go through a lot of Sierra games with a walkthrough, just because I have too many of them to play straight and the puzzles are often impossible. See…

King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne: …this game (continued from the last sentence of Conquests). The puzzles here aren’t all that much harder than KQ1, but it does have an incredibly frustrating mechanic where there’s a rickety bridge that you can only cross three or four times before it collapses and you can’t cross it again; IOW you’re shit out of luck and have to reload an old game or, more realistically, restart the game because you have exactly the number of crossings as you need to finish the game – no more – so this is basically just a ploy to make a mid-’80s adventure game artificially more replayable. I can’t even imagine the frustration of having to figure out this game on your own. The third game has the frustrating mechanic where you have to collect magical ingredients and then hide them before the wizard gets home. I think you’re limited to a certain number of days (when you’re still trapped by the wizard) before you lose.

Kingdom Hearts: I got a 4TB SSD with Christmas money (like a hard drive, but faster) that I put a PS2 emulator and all the games on, so it’s like a virtual PS2. Having done all this, it would be a shame not to play a PS2 game right away. Yes, this is the Squaresoft Disney action-RPG, with the main character, Donald Duck, and Goofy. It’s spawned a number of sequels but this is the only one I’ve ever owned or played. Highly recommended, even if you’ve never actually seen a Disney cartoon (I’m a Warner Brothers man). Many of the levels are based on Disney movies (Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, etc.). Cooler than that makes it sound.

Secret Agent: Great little puzzle-platformer. In the later levels there’s a lot of backtracking because you have to do things in the right order. I’ve beaten episode 1 (of three in the original game, four in the rerelease) and I’ve had my fill for now, though I’ll come back. These little shareware games from the ’90s were really a great value for the time, and still are.

Super Mario Bros.: Got into emulation, so why not play the original SMB? It’s still a fucking great game, behind SMB3 and Super Mario World but ahead of most of the others. My SNES emulator has save-state mapped to L2 and load-state, R2. In my NES emulator, rewind is L2 and fast-forward is R2. These are both macros that will help you in the game, but I got them mixed up and, as I couldn’t spam save- and load-states, I assumed I had to play the game straight and I got to level 6-2 with three lives and no save states, rewind, or warp zones. Really, the easiest way to play this game is to hold right and jump when you need to. The flying fish levels (level 3 of some worlds) would destroy you if you stood still. Anyway there’s a reason this game is still beloved when other “embryonic” games (Hydlide, some would say the Dragon Warrior I and II, if they’re stupid) are considered unplayable nowadays (as in the late ’90s).

Tactics Ogre: Reborn: Maybe the best-regarded Ogre Battle game. Yes, the series is named after a Queen song, as are the subtitles of the other games (“March of the Black Queen”, “Person of Lordly Caliber”). Think Final Fantasy Tactics but without the FF crossover, and it’s better. Great pixel graphics – it’s a remaster, not an outright remake. Your party has a level cap based on where you are in the game (winning storyline battles lets you get to higher levels) so there’s sort of a forced parity there, which however doesn’t make the game that much harder. I usually hate games where the bad guys level up with you, but this is a fucking awesome game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan: Do you mind if I’m weird for a second? This game was profiled in an issue of Nintendo Power when it came out, and I wanted to play it so, so bad but didn’t have a Game Boy. Fast-forward to the TMNT Cowabunga Collection and whatever my GB emulator is. Uh, the game sucks. It’s easy as hell and, worse, your turtle is smack in the middle of the screen; the rest of the screen scrolls and your turtle is always at the center. Foot soldiers and shit come at you from the left and right, so you’re just basically whacking easy moles all level until you get to the boss. Quit after one level. Sometimes the six-year-old you is wrong when it comes to good-looking games.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade): Also from the Cowabunga Collection. This game is better than the NES port because you can insert infinite coins, and hence have infinite lives, by pressing start. Anyway it’s a beat-em-up Turtles game as most of the future ones (not Clan) would be, and you know this because it’s about 35 years old and you’ve played it. But the arcade version has killed graphics and sound. The Cowabunga Collection also has rewind, which should be invaluable for the dam level in TMNT1. Unfortunately you still can’t play the Simpsons arcade game except for an arcade emulator or the actual cabinet. Rights ‘n’ all.