Games! I play 'em! Occasionally. Sometimes.

I need a break from editing, so I figured I'd ramble a bit about what I'm playing at the moment and what's in store for the future. My big news is that I'll soon own a modest computer, probably within the next month and a half or so. This will be my first self-purchased computer since 2008 or so. While I love the laptop my brother gave me, it's starting to develop some worrisome quirks, and I'd like to get a desktop before this breaks for good.

It won't be a beastly gaming computer. I have been doing well with the writing, but not THAT well. My plan is to buy a decent midrange computer now, then in a few years when I'm hopefully a billionaire bestseller with supermodels hanging off both arms, I'll invest into a really nice Origin computer or something similar.

In the meantime, I've been updating my Steam wishlist, since I've largely been ignoring PC games for... hell, three years, at least. Civ VI is probably the great big fat tantalizing jewel, but I'm really looking forward to getting my mitts on Marvel Heroes and Grim Dawn, too. Hit me up if you've got some quirky recommendations! Or hell, even if you're in indie development and want to show your project some love, throw down a title in the comments. I'm down to play whatever, even if it's not my cup of tea. I cussed out Giant Bomb lately for the "waiting on the server" video from a couple of weeks ago, so maybe I'll put my money where my mouth is and play a few indie games every week for a few minutes apiece to see what's out there.

On to what I've been playing!

Deus Ex is why I shouldn't put half-played games on my GOTY list

...because boy howdy, did I hit a wall hard in that game.

At one point, our plucky hero Jensen has to jump into a VR simulation puzzle thing that's just utter garbage, from a gaming standpoint. It's uninteresting. The puzzles don't really take advantage of the gameplay, are visually head-scratching (seriously, how the eff am I supposed to see half the crappy infrared nonsense?) and the whole thing feels like a bad bit of DLC just thrown into the middle of the game. I hit that point and realized as good as parts of that game really are, it had no place on my GOTY list for 2016.

Dishonored 2 makes me feel like a psychopath

...and I'm kind of okay with that, I guess? It's a weird game in that the stealth mechanics are largely reliant upon how observant you are of your surroundings (at least in the early game). Me being blind, I was just stumbling into bad guys left and right, so I stopped trying to spec for stealth and just ended up concentrating on being a murder machine. At that point, I really stopped caring about the gameplay, which is kind of a shame, because I feel like the pieces are there for something really fun.

It doesn't help much that Bethesda's created a really cool world with little reason to care about what actually happens within it. Corvo and Emily's story is boring as hell, the villains are barely given any time to shine, and the whole plot is just one quick info dump followed by "revenge, revenge, revenge!" There's no nuance here, which is weird, considering the strengths of the well-developed world and the rich history of the locales.

And in a shocking twist, I really like a turn-based strategy game

Fire Emblem Heroes is kind of perfect for a bite-sized free to play game. The entirety of the campaign can be ripped through relatively fast, and without any addictive hooks in its multiplayer, I feel like I've gotten just enough out of it to say, "Boy, that was a fun few hours!" It doesn't need to be anything more than that. If it was, I'd probably be tempted to spend money on it, only to realize almost immediately that I'm just pissing more money away on mobile games I'll never pick back up a month later.

The gameplay is simple, the characters are pretty inconsequential but plentiful, and there's a fair-ish amount of meat to the campaign, but it never overstays its welcome. It's not bad!

And that's about it...

Okay, I suppose I should quit dicking around and get back to it. How's your 2017 in gaming going? Or how's your 2017 just in general? Up to anything fun so far this year?