The Gathering

One thing I love about being a Uni student is the complete and total removal of the ‘I’ve got to look cool in front of everyone and must dismiss all quote-unquote uncool pass-times’ thought in your mind that kind of dominated high school.

Which is why my mates at Uni got me a Magic: the Gathering starter deck for my birthday and convinced me to dust off my old Magic cards to start playing again.

You don’t realise how much you miss playing card games until you start playing them again – they’re quite awesome – and we all seem to be around the same skill level, which makes playing with each other much more fun, than being dominated by one person each round. Victory is earned by all, depending on how you draw.

Now I just need to convince them to play D&D and all will be well.

The Binding of Isaac

I’m totally getting into Indie games at the moment. I don’t think I’ve ever really been all about the ‘mainstream’ games – sure I’ve played my share of Call of Duty (I love the crap out of Nazi Zombies) and Halo and those types of games, but they’ve never really been my favourite – but I’ve never really delved into the real Indie area until the past year or so.

My introduction to some awesome Indie titles does come through the Humble Bundles, the idea of which I love, and while my initial interest into my first Bundle was through the game Psychonaughts, I’ve now decided to get the Indie Bundle each time it comes around, regardless of what’s on offer. There are some really interesting games out there.

The one that’s caught me at the moment is The Binding of Isaac, which beautifully combines random map generation with interesting, intense game-play. I love the idea that you are given very, very limited information about the maps that you’re playing, the enemies you fight and the items that you come across, without it being an annoying gimmick.

What I’m enjoying about Indie games is that they’re usually quite short, which means there’s no useless padding and we receive more concentrated quality immediately. They’re usually built on simple, yet interesting mechanics and, when they aim to tell a story, it’s done very effectively and in a minimalist fashion – an excellent story was told in Limbo, with absolutely no dialogue or context, it was thrilling.

I’d really love to just spend a couple of days doing nothing but playing Indie games, just to see the vast range that’s out there… Damn life, getting in the way of gaming and being antisocial…

Winning

Like everything, my girlfriend beat me at ‘Rolling Stones Trivial Pursuit’ last night.

The only game that I can win reasonably consistently is Jenga. Sometimes. Kind of.

She just beats me at everything. The worst is Tetris and Doctor Mario. Not going to lie, it’s sometimes painful how much better she is that me.

More Werewolves!

We’re playing Werewolves again! But this time, we’re adding in so many new characters to try, test and confuse the crap out of us.

It’s such an awesome game.