Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

In 2017 I switched from Intel to the new (at the time)  AMD AM4 Ryzen platform and started completely from scratch with all new components in a new case. I still think of it as my 2017 rig even though almost every  component has been upgraded since. Nevertheless like the Ship of Theseus it retains its essential identity as  my "2017 Computer" and is likely to do so until the next time I build a new PC from scratch. Yesterday I replaced the Ryzen 5 3600 CPU with a rather unnecessary Ryzen 7 5800x for no better reason than spotting one at a decent price on a local trading site. This change is somewhat significant because it probably marks the end of the upgrade path for this rig. The AM4 socket has reached end of the line with the 5000 series and any further upgrade would be prohibitively expensive for very little gain. The rig in its current state has plenty of horsepower to see me through the next couple of years until I am ready to start again from scratch with a new pla...

The title is a quote attributed to game designers in an intriguing article by John Davison of Game Pro . The article itself has some interesting points to make about the future of game design and is well worth a read but some of the things I took out of it are: The fact that game designers are now measuring players actions in game with embedded tools. The fact that the results of these measurements is that only a small minority of hard core players (less than 5% is suggested) play a game as intended through to completion. More than 90% of players just play for four or five hours and prefer to just "dick around" rather than follow the prescribed structure of the game.

In a moment of boredom I fired up a spreadsheet to try and analyse how many games I bought last year, how much I paid for them and how many of them I have actually played. There is a bit of estimation involved because I am too lazy to go back over old credit card bills but in general I think my figures are pretty sound. Please note I only include full feature games that I first acquired in the period from November 2009 to the present. I do include full featured games that I got for free but I don't include Flash games. I include mmorpgs that I either started or bought a paid expansion for during the year. Level of play is a somewhat subjective measure. Zero percent means I never even played the tutorial. 100% means I finished the main campaign of a single player or I spent a substantial amount of time in multiplayer. Please note that all of the games were legally acquired. I don't pirate games. Number of new PC Games Acquired from November 2009 to October 2010: Games f...

I have been playing a bit of "Avadon, The Black Fortress" from Spiderweb software. This is an unashamedly old school party based rpg that looks like it could have been made twenty years ago but hides a rich gaming experience underneath its ugly exterior. With its strong storyline and deep character development the game reminds me of the original Fallout and even Planescape Torment which is high  praise indeed. I have about twenty hours played and I am less than half way through my first play through so there is plenty of entertainment value in here. Even as I was enjoying the game myself I did wonder if a younger audience would be prepared to see beyond the dated graphics and somewhat clunky controls. Happily Jeff Vogel the owner of Spiderweb software which created this game is a vocal member of the indie gaming community and he keeps an informative blog . Spiderweb is doing very well, thank you very much. Games like the Avernum and Geneforge sagas have been paying the b...

I remember a time when people used to buy media content by the piece. You bought  a book, record, video or game and brought it home to keep forever. I have no great nostalgia for those times because content was expensive and the selection was limited. The advent of the internet and digital distribution shook things up and for a brief few years a lot of people thought that they could just keep downloading everything for free. Nowadays however we are firmly in the age of the subscription service where you can have access to a large selection of titles for a relatively modest subscription fee as long as you keep paying month by month. Subscription services have become utterly dominant in music and video and there are some very compelling offerings in video games and books now too.  These subscription services appear to offer an unbeatable value proposition. The monthly fee offers an enormous library of content and this fee is often less than you would have to pay for a single pie...

... you don't keep up with all the new releases? As a gamer in my mid 40's I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I am getting to the point where the number of excellent older games that I haven't gotten around to playing exceeds the quantity of living hours remaining to me to play them in.  While this reflection on my own mortality might be depressing it is also wonderfully liberating. I find that I am less and less incensed at the future direction of gaming because even if the whole gaming industry collapses tomorrow morning then I can continue to enjoy many years worth of engrossing virtual entertainment by playing existing titles. This fun cartoon from xkcd highlights some advantages and disadvantages of being a retro gamer. Writing about five year old games is certainly not going to do much for the popularity of my blog but I guess I can live with that although I will admit is is nice sometimes to be part of the buzz that surrounds the latest greatest t...

I went to install something today and my PC said no. Three years worth of gaming has filled my 250Gb hard drive up to the very brim. A quick scan with Spacemonger confirmed that 90% of the disk was filled with games. I decided to be moderately ruthless and un-install any game I haven't played in over a year. Some folk have a strong sentimental attachment to their save games as this terrific piece by Lara Crigger in Gamers with Jobs testifies. There was time when I felt the same way. I was so proud to have completed Doom / Descent / Half Life that I religiously copied my save games from one PC to the next each time I upgraded. Now however I seem to have outgrown that. There are too many games and just too little time. The truth is that even when I do go back to an older game I generally start over from the beginning. Unless I seriously think I am going to use them again the save games are going too. By the way I am using the excellent Revo Uninstaller to do the actually clean up...

Surely the most ignominious moment for PC Gaming in recent years was when so many members of the loudly protesting Steam Modern Warfare 2 boycott group were exposed to be actually playing the game. Well I guess I can lay claim to some small bit of personal pride that I did not cave in and maintained my own personal boycott of the game. Of course this was somewhat easier for me because my boycott wasn't based on a sense of entitlement as to what Activision should or shouldn't put into their games. For me the big issue has always been the price of the game. The €60 initial purchase price was more than the game was worth to me.There was just too much other gaming entertainment available to me for less money to make that a worthwhile purchase. Given that the game racked up more than a billion dollars in sales it it perhaps no surprise that MW2 maintained it high price point far longer than most other games. The price did fall but only slowly and while I kept an eye out for it i...