dumplingsquid

It's currently 27°C but the weather report says it feels like ‎35° and it's only 9 a.m. Fortunately, it's supposed to start raining this afternoon and that will drop the temperature 10°C, which, well, every little bit helps. Our poor aircon was struggling over the weekend to keep up with the sun hitting the bricks and streaming into the windows of our condo and it's probably up there trying its best now. Next month we'll need to have someone out to check up on the HVAC to make sure it's working well--it's one of those things that you're supposed to do every year but money has been tight.

Speaking of money, I have finally decided to crack down and go iron-handed on the budgeting. sashagee has given me the go-ahead to put her on a strict budget--on our shared money at least, she can do whatever she wants with her monthly salary that I pay her--and since I've been using Quicken (and Microsoft Money before that) for decades at this point, I finally downloaded the app and synced it on both of our phones so she can see our budget at a glance. We'd been going over budget for a while and this will let us figure out where the money is going...or would if I didn't already know where it's going. It's going into healthcare costs and food.

It's always going to healthcare costs and food.

I finished a book recently--Delta Green, the RPG that's a mix of the X-Files and Call of Cthulhu--and when I looked at my Goodreads account I saw that I'm fourteen books behind on my reading goals for this year. I used to read eighty books a year before the Plague Years, but everything got thrown for a loop after that. After Delta Green I picked up Surprised by G-d by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, which I've had in my 積ん読 (tsundoku, "Buying books without reading them") pile for a while. I'm a third of the way through and my big take-away at the moment is that it's weirdly similar to one of those evangelical "I used to be a sinner but I Saw The Light" memoirs. Rabbi Ruttenberg was a punk kid who hung out in Chicago going to shows--she namedrops The Alley on Belmont so props for that--and thought that G-d and Torah were dumb old traditions with no meaning in modern times. But she took a trip with her father to the camps in Europe, and then later her mother died of cancer and she started going back to shul, and I haven't gotten there yet but I'm waiting for the part where she Sees The Light. I mean, she's a rabbi now, I know where this is going. It's not affecting my enjoyment of the book, it's just surprising to me how well it maps onto The Standard Narrative. But there's still seventy percent of the book to go, so we'll see where the road leads.

After nearly 200 hours, I'm finally at the point in Vintage Story where I'm in a position to to the (vintage) story. I have some teleportation stones (from the Ruststones mod) charged up so I can make the dozens-of-miles-long trek north to the Resonance Archive to figure out what's going on with it. I'm glad I discovered there's an overland route, so I don't have to make a canal to the northern ocean. In a couple weeks, I should have a review and I can move on to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. The real reason is that I'm hitting the same wall I usually hit in these long games. It happened when I played my heavily modded games of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (each of which took about 200 hours), it happened in Stardew Valley, it happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it's when I start off very excited, and I make big plans, and I stretch out the gameplay as long as I can, and then there comes a time when my motivation just...peters out, and I start rushing headlong toward the end so I can finish. There's no specific point where the switch is thrown, and I can predict when it will happen. In Vintage Story, I had a bunch of plans for what I was going to do when spring finally came again, all the crops I would plant and the upgrades I did to my greenhouse to prepare for it, and now it's looking like it'll be pointless because I'll beat the game before it's warm enough to put any seeds in the ground.

Some of this is just that I'm doing too much of the same thing and want a change. For example, it didn't happen in Baldur's Gate II. Maybe because I played it in bits in between the other things I'm doing. On the other hand, even though there's a whole route and revamped content in Night in the Woods that I haven't done yet, I haven't gone back to it yet after eight years. And this is in contrast with literature--there I often don't want a book to end, and I know some of that is because I write reviews of all the books I read so finishing a book means I have homework, but I also write reviews of all the games I play so there's no difference there. And of course, books obviously don't take 200 hours to read unless you're reading the Talmud or something, and Daf Yomi means you stretch that out like I stretched out my Baldur's Gate II playthrough. So what is it?

Okay, between this paragraph and the previous one I stared out the window for a while and you know, I actually thought of a possible explanation--action. Video games are an active medium, they require you to do things to complete them. Even the most text-heavy visual novel requires you to make a plot-relevant choice occasionally. Books (and TV shows etc) don't require any action, they just require absorption of information. So maybe what I'm actually getting sick of is the repetitive actions, and what's more, the constrained possible range of actions. In Vintage Story I can move blocks around, explore, craft, fight monsters, farm crops, and so on...but there are very few NPCs to talk to, no character sheet to level, no job classes to pick, etc. The mechanics have been basically the same for those entire 200 hours and what I really want is a set of new mechanics. Order of Ecclesia has platforming challenges, gimmick boss fights, and killing monsters for their glyphs. Vintage Story has...well, I've heard it does have a gimmick boss fight but it doesn't have any of the rest of those. It'll be a big change.

You know, I didn't actually expect to come up with a real answer when I sat down to write this, but it also explains why I tend to pick very different games. Just look at the list of games I played in 2024 and you'll notice I never played the same type of game twice in a row. The closest were River City Girls and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but the former was a co-op beat-'em-up and the latter was almost a metroidvania, so they were still very different. What I'm looking for is mechanical variety.