It's Taxes

Today’s challenge item was really easy for me. I know exactly where I go when I want a “quick fix” of good gameplay that doesn’t ask a lot from me. Destiny is my gaming cheeseburger. It’s familiar, it’s fast, and I’m almost always in the mood for it. It’s also one of the few games I love that I consistently get the “Ewww, you actually play that?” response when I talk about it. Whatever, though. Those of us that actually play Destiny know how good it is.

_©2016 Bungie_

Despite how many hours I’ve sunk into the game, however, I wouldn’t really call myself a hardcore Destiny player. I’ve never done raids, and my characters have never hit the light cap or come anywhere near it. I just play for fun, and I usually end up doing patrols or story missions to kill time. It’s also a fun game to play with friends when we have a few hours together.

The funny thing is I didn’t even like it at first. I played at launch back in 2014 and found it incredibly difficult (I had never played a console FPS before, so I think it was just getting used to the controls). I gave it a second chance when The Taken King launched and fell in love almost instantly. I think part of it was that I had practiced playing Borderlands 2 with a controller, and the other part was all the quality of life improvements made in the intervening year.

If you’re curious, here are my characters:

• Warlock (my main, primarly Sunsinger but I’ve been working on Voidwalker)
• Titan
• Hunter

(Full disclaimer: I’m an employee of Activision Blizzard, but I don’t have any direct involvement with the game.)

I had a tough time with this one. I could name any number of just obscure titles that I think deserve more attention, but honestly when I think “underrated,” I think of titles that maybe were unfairly rated by critics and community, leading to a cascade effect of new players not even trying the game because of popular opinion. For this entry I’m going to pick No Man’s Sky, which I’m sure will peeve some people, but I think was deserving of more praise as a game than it received. There is a definite swirl of controversy around the game’s developers and marketing that I won’t even begin to address here, because it’s honestly secondary to talking about the game itself.

_©2016 Hello Games_

When you shed all the overblown expectations of what the game ultimately did not do, when you take a look at what it does do, there is a nice kernel of great ideas to be found.

At first, I had a difficult time deciding what my “favorite” character could possibly be from all of video games. After decades of gaming and who knows how many titles and characters, there were simply too many to choose from. Then as I woke up this morning it came to me. There was one particular character that has shaped me throughout my life that I wanted to talk about.

Let’s talk about white mage from Final Fantasy.

_White mage & wizard © Square Enix_

Originally I had planned to work on my Critterbits engine over the holiday break, but then as I got into the past week I realized that it had been a very long time since I had allowed myself to just do nothing. I can’t overstate the power of just having time without obligations every once in a while to reset yourself and reduce stress, and the changeover from 2016 to 2017 seemed like an apropos time to do so. I spent time with my family over Hanukkah and played Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I relaxed and caught up with my favorite YouTube series. I played games. Nothing I did really felt like work, and I tried my best not to plan out my time, which was the biggest factor in actually being able to unwind.

As far as games go, I went back to Destiny again, which despite having seen what it has to offer, I still enjoy immensely just as a time-waster. I recreated my hunter (which was my first character) and played through the story again. The mission design in this game is excellent, and the moment-to-moment gameplay was stellar as always. I just wish they had spent time making the story less nonsensical. When they actually have cutscenes, they’re usually well crafted, but the dialogue is vague and doesn’t really contribute much to the story (plus, it’s full of writing gems like “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” … gag). Hopefully when Destiny 2 comes along they’ll fix some of that and make the game more coherent. I’m also hoping that they port to PC eventually… my wife really wants to play co-op with me, and it’s tough justifying the buy of a second PlayStation 4 and TV just to play together.

We also played Age of Empires II HD with friends almost every evening.

I’m a ball of useless, sickly foxgirl right now, so I don’t have many meaty updates today. I’m mostly just sitting here watching YouTube and playing games. But I had a few things I wanted to talk about.

Critterbits 32-bit versus 64-bit

So far I’ve maintained both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of my game engine up to this point. I’m not really even sure why I felt that it was necessary. I think it’s just been tradition to support both for so many years that I didn’t even think about it. Apparently the most recent Steam update for Linux dropped 32-bit support, so it made me stop and think about it for a minute.