Beastro
Arcane
It's amazing how much more precious your attention becomes when you literally don't have anything else to do but play whatever it is you are playing; and since I played Tyranny on literally dollars-per-watt (elec generator running on gas) literally every single thing I did cost me money.
Reminds me of my year of privation. After months of not having much to eat, much less something sweet I ran across some knock off Recolas in the medicine cabinet when grabbing something for a headache.
I enjoyed the shit out of those things since they were the only sweet thing I'd had for almost a year, same as I enjoyed a terrible game by the name of Cutthroats Terror on the High Seas.
I'm not saying you're wrong about Tyranny here, but I think your circumstances and privation are colouring things.... or that they actually put things into perspective and show how every game should be played instead of being swamped in a sea of desensitization.
also this proved a fantastic opportunity to read my backlog of books:
I read so many I was going to list them but won't bother, but I've read by now around 30 books or so I hadn't gotten around to reading.
also started drawing again, out of boredom, and coloring in some old coloring books I had stashed away.
The best reading though was a stash of around 30 issues of Game Players / Ultra Game Players magazine I found... the earliest issue being from 1994 and featuring reviews for Breath of Fire 1 (snes), hehe.
Fuck at one moment I was so bored I read through the entire D&D 2nd edition adaptation of DIABLO II... LOL.
I think you've discovered the fundamental reason behind things like fasting and other self-imposed bits of self-denial, to capture that odd sense of enjoyment struggling to find something to do in moments of privation, that looking back, is better than something objectively better, just like those knock off Recolas in that moment topping anything sweet I've eaten in years.
So basically you got Stockholm syndrom'd into liking a game due to a hurricane?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification
People don't really understand how hard it is to make an RPG with lots of C&C, so of course they have ridiculous expectations.
It helps if you go about a bit of a day imagining what different outcomes couple happen from your choices moment to moment and what a pain it would be to program even a fraction of them.
It's silly that the usual outcome is only 3 choices, or that as much as choice diverge they all come to roughly the same end (like standing before the same end boss regardless of what you do) or that the sequel will pick off from one point regardless of what you did in the previous game.
They're silly, but they're a part of games due to the limitations of production, in much the same way that people eagerly desire to see a novel they love fully made into a movie, but never will be satisfied because nothing compares to the human imagination.
"If this is a cautionary tale, if there is some moral you can take away from this, you are free to extract it for yourself. If you do, perhaps you can act on it."
Lazy... science journo's always neutral positive.
IMO, it's them being passive aggressive.
That event is one of the worst to happen to life on Earth, but it's also one of the best as complex life couldn't have existed without that transition.
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