Happy slightly belated New Year, one and all. I hope that 2016 is as splendid and marvellous for you as 2015 only 1/365th longer, unless 2015 was neither splendid nor marvellous in which case I hope that 2016 is both splendid and indeed marvellous, or at least as splendid and marvellous as can realistically be hoped for. In fact even if 2015 was splendid and marvellous I still hope 2016 is more so, if such is even… Mr Dalliard! I appear to have vastly overcomplicated my attempts to wish visitors a Happy New Year and require a metafictional device to escape the opening paragraph!
So! Shoes. Or rather games. Not really much to report, as nothing much fired my enthusiasm over Christmas. I finished Wolfenstein: The New Order, not bad, slightly annoying final boss fight. War Thunder continues to thunder along, in a warlike fashion. The seasonal Steam sale was a rather calm affair, with a bunch of games discounted for the whole sale rather than Daily Instant Flash Look Now Now Now Next Fourteen Seconds Only offers. The trading card gimmick was to browse your “Discovery Queue”, which had the desired effect once as I saw Audiosurf 2 pop up on sale. I enjoy firing up Audiosurf now and again to surf new music acquisitions, so thought I might as well pick up the sequel (review so far: quite like the first one but a bit shinier).
I have just picked up Fallout 4 (review so far: quite like the third one but a bit shinier). My basic game-buying stance tended to be either to pre-order a game if it had a strong pedigree/reviews and offered some sort of shiny trinket as an incentive, or to wait ’til the price dropped to less than a fiver on Steam/GOG/The Humble Store. Fewer and fewer things have met the first criteria, I think the last thing I pre-ordered was Dragon Age: Inquisition, which my aged brain has filed under “recent” but was more than a year ago. On the flip side, games seem to be holding their price a bit better, with sales during the first year or two knocking off 10-40% rather than immediately plummeting to super-bargain levels. As such, with Amazon having the game at a decent-if-not-spectacular price (for a physical copy, £15 less than the Steam code) I figured I might as well tack it onto an order. I can’t remember the last physical game box I bought; probably an Elder Scrolls Online pre-order. Didn’t bother with the DVD, just typed the code into Steam and set the download off.
Fallout 4 might take me a while to complete, as exploring new places, meeting the locals, then offering to help and/or shoot them (depending on how nice they seem) only takes up about a third of my time. Far more important is then stripping the bodies, containers and general surroundings of anything that can be humanly lifted, and conveying it back to my home settlement in a series of shuttle runs. I was something of a packrat in previous Elder Scrolls/Fallout games, and the fact that junk items can be broken down into crafting resources means I can’t possibly leave behind a single coffee cup or clipboard in my wasteland adventures.
Being a bit of a hoarder in real life as well, it did make me think that I should be grateful for e-books, MP3s and Steam. If I had to store physical versions of all my digital books, music and games, we’d need to move to a bigger house…
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