#471

Oh! Oh-ho! As is well-known, I am a derelict crawling on his belly when it comes to playing the bulk of new and potentially interesting games as they drop. Stray is just one such game. Only now that it graces the Switch can I at last plunge into its manifold, exquisite oils--appropriate timing for Factually Game Theory 2024.

I love cats. Really had to put my head in my hands and think when I was looking at the settings and saw that one could have cat death shown or not shown by this game. Eventually I decided my enjoyment would be most complete with the stakes turned up to maximum. So now I play this game as though this cat were the actual earthly vessel of my consciousness, which is how I'm philosophically inclined to play it anyway--to a certain person, a me kind of person, a game like this is one of the most delicious and complete roleplaying opportunities there is. My method basically instantly became to marry the design with my own playstyle to approximate the decisions and expressions of my cat-self moving through the world-as-it-is. This has lent it an intensity which exposes me to the beauty and terror on display that represents the entire case for digital entertainment. Absolutely, undeniably transcendental experiences.

Looks like I would have to revise my Game of the Fuckin Year 2022 selections--if things worked like that around here. Think they don't. Think if I didn't play a game before I made the list, it didn't make the cutoff, arbitrary though it may be. Perhaps some other list, some other time,

Damn, though. Just a couple hours in, but I know the feeling of something immense hanging over me, distributed payload at the ready, my absolute destruction the only possibly outcome. Nature is truly wonderful: my lachrymose reserves are plump, my glands and ducts primed. For every action, equal and appropriate reaction and all that.

*

It's become a problem ever since I opened the gates for myself grabbing the next Final Fantasy game after the next Final Fantasy game I needed to clamber into in order to survive, like a lacerated, battered soldier, internal landscapes creatively rearranged, dragging themselves from mechsuit to mechsuit in unending combat, gasping as each round of fresh hypos drive home the enzymes and nerve blockers and blinking rapidly as cortical arrays sync to flood a dying brain with clarity.

Uh, Anyway, been purchasing games like a maniac, games I can't afford, except they are so on sale as to be unmissable. Caught in an evil machinery, I writhe with pleasure even as my flesh is torn from my bones by the action of the intermeshed gears.

Haha! Where is this imagery coming from? I might be stressed out. I dunno. That's another good reason to go into debt getting video games to play and play.

*

Got Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns. Now I have to replay and finally finish XIII so I can finally play the copy of XIII-2 I got like ten years ago so I can at long last let that particular file finish downloding in my brain for one and all. A trilogy works on my mind in certain ways; this should accomplish my goal.

Also got LiveALive, or however it might be cool to spell that--as far as I am concerned, that title is untranslated Japanese, the kind of thing I might see as grafitti in any major city on the planet. The game itself is something that looks very interesting indeed.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is the only other Vanillaware title I can secure on the Switch, and it was an act of supreme restraint to not have bought it already. The smallest sale and I crumbled. Ordinarily you can miss me with the intricacies of these high-school style dramas, but mystery, giant mechs, and Vanillaware art and writing. I would pay any amount--I don't want to say it o baldly but it it is true--to play old Vanillaware games on my Switch, especially Odin Sphere, which I never got a chance to hardly even look at the art of.

Other games whose sale price skewered my abilty to reason include Hades, which I have resisted for actual years. Finally seeing that magic 50% off, plus a recent reccomendation bolstering its desirability, clinched me in absolute terms.

Damn near bought Octopath Traveler II when I was getting the first two games I mentioned. Absolutely loving Octopath Traveler, which I had coveted since its release.

Frankly? Honestly? Kind of regretting not snatching it up. I mean, why bother even stopping myself? Well, after that and the guitars I should have accumulated roughly enough value to make only the most necessary purchases until I must needs secure the next console in my life.

Oh, these golden fetters. It is a kind of madness, but, what can one do, acknowledging that? 

A couple of weeks ago? I bought books and I didn't even tell you. I will list them, eventually. But these lapses in discipline, these splurges into the nether-realm of credit card bills, which I know is indefensible, are as delicious and sensual to me right now as I imagine adultery is to the monogamous. My mind reels and my throat tightens as things draw to their fumbling climax, and the languorous, stupid-grinning comedown must surely be why so much straight people shit is obsessed with this kind of behavior. In this state, the mind breeds justifications like cockroaches.

--JL

edit: yeah, I went back and got Octopath 2. What can I say? This swordfighter on the fucking cover--art like this paralyzes my faculties. 

Obviously, I can hold off buying the majority of personally desired games that come out for years and years. But when the stars are right, or whatever the fuck is happening during times like these, I just have no defenses. All that shit flies straight out the window.