Okay, so I play a LOT of puzzle games. The regular big-name brand-game market doesn't exactly cater to my needs in that respect. So I find myself turning more and more to indie games to satiate that hunger in me. But the offering in the indie games market is totally HUGE. I mean, like ridiculously huge. One simply cannot afford to buy blindly and just try things out. So I always search for reviews before commiting to purchase.

Now, mostly, the games I look for haven't been officially reviewed by any major gaming sites. So I look for user reviews and Let's Play videos etc. But some of them have caught the eye of the public at large. And always, without a fail, a considerable amount of the comments expresses a certain sentiment. That is roughly this:

This is a game where you solve puzzles and look for hidden things, by a small game company. How come this game gets a good review, when (any random triple-A title) got less?

Do you see something wrong in there? No? Then let me enlighten you. What you see here is an attitude that says that if the game represents a certain genre, it cannot get full points. Just by the virtue of being, for example, a point&click, something like 2 points should be docked, so the absolute max. grade for any game of that genre is 8 out of 10. Because if a f***ing point&click gets 9,5 it's a total insult and a gauntlet to the face of anyone who likes GTA, CoD, Elder Scrolls, Halo, GoW, MGS, Uncharted... Hell, you name it! It just cannot be! It's an inferior game because... What? What exactly makes it inferior as a game?

You know what I think? I think most people who go around saying things like that have absolutely no idea what games are. I mean, I see people loudly claiming that Grand Theft Auto games have ALWAYS been this and that, when those people have never even played any beyond 3 or 4. They have no idea that games have history that goes way beyond 21 century. Have you ever heard of chess? Go? Chinese checkers? Halma? Mancala? Patience? Do you really think that to be a good game, you have to be able to shoot things with variety of guns or that there absolutely needs to be an enemy?

I get that people get irrationally angry when they think they themselves (or what they like) is threatened. But get a grip, okay? No one is threatening your happy bubble. You can still shoot anything you like in the virtual world, and plenty of games catering to that kind of audience will be released from now until the foreseeable future. It's just that games can be and ARE so much more. They have always been and they will continue to be more. And what I really want you to stop and to think about is, how can it harm you that there is a wide variety of games around you and that they can all be considered good, great and perfect? What exactly is there to be scared of? What is it that causes such a gut reaction in you? Just think about it, okay?

I just came here and asked myself:

Did I buy any new games, punk? Well, did I?

I don't think I did. But it's so hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes I just totally forget. I think that last games I bought were from Steam sales but hey, I just got money a couple of days ago. What did I use it on? Comics? Yes. Beer? Yes. Whiskey? Yes. Games? Dunno.

I bought this game from Steam sales and I've been playing it today. Playing and feeling horribly nauseous. I'm currently taking a second break from it because I felt like I would vomit soon if I did not stop. My head is just not 3D compatible.

Something I oddly found to be a little relieving, that helped me play a bit further, was burping. You read that right. I made myself burp when the nausea got too bad and it alleviated it for a minute or two. Sometimes sticking out my tongue helps a bit too. It's very strange.

Whoa. I had quite a long pause from gaming. I've been having all sorts of hurry and stress in my life and as sweet as escaping to worlds of games would have been, I just didn't have any time. But now I've been slowly making a return. At christmas I bought about 20 games from GOG sales as a gift for myself and I've been destroying my way through those slowly, but steadily.

I finally bough Torchlight and as short as the main game is, the mods added tons of fun in to it. I also really like To the Moon. Great story, good musics and a nice SNES-vibe. Dungeon Keeper 2 was as fun as I remembered and still manages to steal a good many hours from my life. And Still Life 2, while not as good as the first Still Life, was still better than the first in the series, Post Mortem. That one dissapointed me a lot since I was not expecting it to be a dialogue puzzle game. SL2 had a lot of nonsensical puzzles though, I had to resort to walkthough often. The puzzles in 7th Guest made much more sense. I only really, REALLY needed a guide to the infamous laboratory puzzle (I used guides to couple of other puzzles too because I was too lazy :P) But no guide can tell you how to solve it. In fact it seems it is not possible to solve it anymore, since it uses the calculating power of your computer to aid it. So the more powerful your computer is, the further ahead the puzzle will count all the possible scenarios. And since the game is 20 years old... Yeah. Unsolvable. Luckily the puzzles in that game are skippable. You just get some consequences if you skip too many. But I only skipped that one.

Then I started Phantasmagoria, but it's sorta a bit... scary ^^;; I don't know. The game menu that has the game controls (that are nice to know, eh?) was kinda spoilerific and now I know there will be chase sequence. It even told who will be chasing you. So great... NOT. I might be stressing that since I reeeeeally don't like those. Makes the game more scary than it really is. Maybe it was intentional... who knows. Anyways, right not I'm not too keen on starting any new horror themed games. And the games that I bough do include Gabriel Knight games, the second Phantasmagoria and also 11th Hour. They will get their turn after a cool down period.

With that said, I did buy a horror game yesterday... But yesterday was an odd day overall. I haven't bough much indie games, like ever. Only ones that come to mind right away are Amanita Design games. That means Machinarium, Samorost and Botanicula. I have them all. And I've certainly never bought them right away when they were released (on some platform that I follow, in this case GOG.com.) I only bought Botanicula on this christmas sale.

So yesterday I bough 2 new releases. I bought Evoland, which is a fun little adventure-RPG that charts some history of both genres. Mainly it bases itself on Zelda and Final Fantasy games. It starts out as a simple game with no colours and sounds. Then you get upgrades. You get 16 colours, then 256. You get beeps, then sound effects. You get levels, you stop dying from one hit, your three hearts turn to health bar. You can buy from an in-game vendor an upgrade to faster CD-player so there will be no loading screens.

And then I bought The Cat Lady.

A horror adventure point&click. Yeah. Horror. And I have no intention of waiting for my mental horror game cool down period to pass. I watched one Let's Play video about it from Youtube. I know the game starts when the main character, the crazy cat lady, tries to commit suicide. And apart from the trailer video on GOG, I don't know much else. But it looks so intriguing. Like it might be just the kind of horror that I like. And I'm very picky about it. First rule is, I don't like to be scared. Something coming to the screen with huge blast of audio etc is not fine for me. I feel the adrenaline hours afterwards and it's not nice. Secondly, action is debatable. It hugely depends on THINGS. I'm not too quick to react to anything, so if the action is very chaotic and even a slight mistake will get me killed, I'm not in the target audience. That's just the way it is. I'm a slowpoke. But I also get motion sickness so any game that makes me be aware of my surroundings at all times is a huge no-no. Spinning camera around constantly makes me puke pretty fast.

So, as a horror genre fan, point&click games are my best bet. Yeah, I know some that break the rules. Games that try to scare you by giving you really cheap sudden spooks (Barrow Hill) while maintaining that their identity is point&click adventure games. But all in all I trust the genre. And from what I've read about The Cat Lady the game is more about the psychological side of horror. It scares you with your personal perception of what might be happening. Not with enemies jumping at you at random times.

So yeah. I'm really looking forward to playing it. But I managed to start Evoland first. And even though it's just 4-6 hours total in gameplay, I'm a perfectionist. I NEED to find all the damned stars. And I haven't found them yet. So, until I find them all or until I give up, I do not get to start playing The Cat Lady.

I've just played Diablo 3 for 9 hours trying to avoid equipping shield to the Templar. Now I found out the game crashing bug happens only with Demon Hunter and I'm playing Barbarian. Yay~

Placed a pre-order for Diablo 3 <.<;;

If the beta I played is any good as an indicator then I don't actually have a computer that would be able to run the game smoothly right now. My laptop is decent when it comes to power but of course the video card forms a bottle neck. My tabletop computer is at my student apartment, some 400 km west from my current location and I have no idea when we'll be able to go there to get it. I suppose I could steal BF's computer for a while, depending on the DRM on the game. I don't have any recent experiences with Blizzard games so I have no idea what they usually do by the way of protecting their games from piracy. As I understand it in most extreme cases you can only install a game once and after that you need to contact customer support and convince them to give you a new activation key. I don't know. As a regular customer of GOG.com and only having purchased games made by CD Projekt RED these last years I feel like I'm some sort of pampered princess and I have no idea what the realities with DRM are these days. I only hear the horror stories.

So can anyone tell me, is it realistic to expect that I can install a game on one computer and play it and then change to another computer without any problems or extra steps on the way? Remember to use simple words so that an unrepenting console gamer like me can understand too :D

I've been sorta pessimistic and generally not very enthusiastic about Diablo 3 for many years now, all the way from the first rumours that were something like "hey all, this is supposed to be Blizzards calendar, they have a suspicious space here, I bet it's D3!" to the first video clips and even when the date was finally confirmed. Maybe I have been preparing myself for a possibility of dissapointment or something since Diablo 2 was such a huge thing for me. I don't know. Few of my friends have acted like they're sitting on burning coals lately but I just couldn't find any exitement in me. Until now. Just out of sheer luck I managed to notice that this is open beta weekend. I swear, my mind went on autopilot :D

My old battle.net username didn't seem to exist anymore, I must have been purged because of years of inactivity. There never really was anything substantial in there anyway, just a couple of sad attempts at Diablo 2 but for some reason I never got the multiplayer to work without awful lag, either in battle.net or just LAN. Good thing that even brand new users get to play the open beta so I just registered again and downloaded the client.

As I expected I couldn't get in when it opened. I didn't actually expect to get in at all that night, but I did, somewhere after 1AM I think (it opened at 10PM local time) and I actually got to play it for a couple of hours before having to give up and go to bed at 4AM :3 It was slow, partly because I'm playing on my laptop but it was so fun~ So much memories. I really do think the beginning was calculated to hit just those nostalgia chords though, since you once again need to visit the ruins of old Tristram and whoo, you get to go after Deckard Cain again! Poor helpless old man. The boss fight is also someone familiar :P

I played some more today. Much less lag but still some performance issues because of laptop. Doesn't even help to bring all the graphic settings to minimum. And the installation did say my graphics card might result some problems. But all in all, still much smoother than last night so the servers aren't so busy anymore, which is nice. And I intend to play the actual game on my tabletop, I just don't have access to it right now and I didn't want to steal BF's computer for the whole weekend. I'm actually somewhat impressed that my laptop actually can run the game at all!

Well anyways, seems I actually get to do more playing than I expected from a server stress test open beta. So far I've only gotten disconnected once. Right now there is a little maintenance pause so I came to write this. Now I'm heading back to see if I can log in again soon :)

Life has been hectic for a while now! I have moved to another town and started to study again, library and information that is. So I'm going to officially become a librarian, yay!

I've been only able to take my DS with me since I don't yet have a television. Oh yeah, I came here alone. BF comes when he finds a good job. Might take a while... Anyway, I've been looking for some cheap old TV's, with cathode ray tube. So, you know, I could maybe take my 8-bit Nintendo here and play Duck Hunt! And since our TV is quite good and we have no need for a second one really, I don't think it's necessary to look for anything too fancy. All I actually need are my PS and PS2 and I'm as happy as a clam. Well, if I do manage to luck out and find something nice I might take the Xbox360 too. I have managed to gather a surprising amount of games for it when compared to the PS3 when you remember that I was the one who actually wanted to buy the PS3 and BF wanted the Xbox360 ._.

But for now, DS :) I bought a bunch of new games for it from here already. Some of them are somewhat rare too (in here that is). They're all EU versions but most have never actually come out here in Finland. And they were used so they weren't too expensive. It's so exiting to again live in a town that has game stores xD

Aaaah!! I finally got it! I got the game of the year edition too (called Complete Edition in US it seems?) and I'm so happy *MANLY tears of joy* Just one thing. I haven't been sleeping properly for about a month and a half now and it's really affecting my eyes and inner ear. I get nausea way more quicker than ever xP So I can only play like half an hour at a time. Sucks :( But I went to see doctor today and I think it was most helpful visit so far. Unlike all the other doctors she didn't just give me a packet of sleeping pills and send me on my merry way. In fact she didn't prescribe them at all (which is good 'cause they're horrible.) Instead I got sleep journal and lots of homework. I need to start to schedule my days with military precision. So yeah, now I have to decide how many times I want to eat in a day and at what times, when to go out, when to work and when to do what ever I want to do. All for sleep. Right now my biological clock is totally messed up and I don't even have a circadian rhythm and it is actually quite more serious problem that I even thought. But hopefully it'll get better. But yeah, right now I really can't play much. Good thing I have couple of good point&click adventures waiting :)

Well, I'm signed up to the Fuse now, since we got the box ...with my awesome achievements from Viva Piñata... as soon as those even update there x) But I do have Star Ocean: Last Hope waiting for me. And I thought I could perhaps get Assassins Creed 2 for xbox if I just get a bit better hang of the controller. Dragon Age: Origins would also seem to be a bit cheaper for the box, when I checked from the local stores. I don't know. Maybe we can get along after all, me and Microsoft :D