What I Played This Week (9/7/2020)
I’ve been wanting to get back to writing about games for a while now, but I haven’t found something specific that I felt like it was worth publishing my thoughts about. But this format should give me both the motivation to write something every week and the freedom to not worry too much about how “important” or “wise” or whatever other reason was stopping me from publishing things. So what is the format? Like any videogame podcast I’m going to just say what I played that week and talk about what my thoughts are about those games. I will try to publish these on Sundays (except this week, which is happening on a Monday, but it’s labor day so it still counts). This week might be longer than future weeks, since I’ll be
So, here’s what I played this week:
Hearthstone: These lists are likely always going to start with Hearthstone. I’ve been playing Hearthstone for years now, and likely will continue to for a good long while. In recent weeks I’ve been playing both Wild constructed and Battlegrounds. Wild is the mode where all cards throughout Hearthstone’s history are available to use, I’ve been playing an aggro Shaman deck that hopes to win by turn 6 with cheap minions and burn spells pointed at the opponent’s face. But most of my time in Hearthstone is spent in Battlegrounds, which is Hearthstone’s “Auto-Battler (or Auto Chess Like if you prefer) mode where you buy minions, set up a board and watch as they fight another player’s board. I really like Battlegrounds, even though this week I spent more time losing than winning. My MMR at its highest was ~8100, and I’ve fallen down to ~7700. There was a fairly recent balance patch for Battlegrounds that really threw me off my rhythm, but I’ll keep playing and hopefully figure out what’s good.
Spiritfarer: I started out really enjoying Spiritfarer, and then didn’t enjoy it as much, and most recently I came back around and really enjoyed it. My problems stem from one of my biggest pet peeves in videogames, and life really, not knowing what to do next. Especially when finding the thing to do isn’t fun. Breath of the Wild is the exception that proves this rule for me, because in BOTW finding the thing to do next was as fun (or even more fun) than doing whatever the thing was. The thing that caused me to think about putting the game down was having a full quest log of requests I couldn’t do because I couldn’t get to the area that had those resources because I didn’t have another resource to get the upgrade to get to that area. Turned out I had to do something that wasn’t marked in my quest log to get that missing resource. Which wasn’t difficult, I just had to figure out what the thing I was missing was, which wasn’t fun. I needed to find one of my animal friends and bring them to The Everdoor. After I got the upgrade, the Ice Breaker, I was able to find new resources, new spirits, and new areas. In broad terms, Spiritfarer has been great, good writing, fun characters, gorgeous visuals. I just met a sentient mushroom who I’m excited to talk to more.
Egg Inc: An idle game that I have been playing off-and-on for a few years. It has lots of resources and upgrades that need to be managed in order to have an efficient egg farm. The standard game can tend to get pretty boring, just waiting for the numbers to get big enough, so they have more short-term games that they call Contracts. The contracts also focus on the number of eggs delivered instead of just trying to earn cash. The contracts make some upgrades more valuable than others. I picked Egg Inc up again after over a year because I deleted the Facebook app off of my phone and I needed something to fill those moments that used to be filled getting mad on Facebook. Egg Inc. is undoubtedly better than that.
Mini Metro: Mini Metro is also likely to appear on this list most weeks, I try to do the Daily Challenge most days, and since deleting Facebook have found myself playing the standard mode a few times a week. Mini Metro is great, I have nothing but good things to say about it. I think I bought it 3 times (once on Steam, once in a humble bundle, and once on the Google Play store). I can’t recommend this game highly enough and am excited to be able to play Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club’s follow-up as soon as it’s released on a platform that I own.
80 Days: I actually played this last weekend, but I wanted to write about it because I was 6 years late to this game, and it’s good. I did 2 full trips around the world last Sunday, one that was a disastrous 110+ day trip, and one lightning fast 53 day trip. Playing 80 days the second time it felt noteworthy that all the routes between cities are (or at least appeared to be) alway the same scenario with the same result. The cities that I traveled through on both of my trips around the world had the same scenarios, I was able to use the knowledge I had gained from the first trip to avoid some of the disastrous routes that had plagued my first trip. There are lots of cities that I haven’t explored yet, so there is reason to play again, but it did feel weird seeing the same scene again. I should play more of this, it was good.
F1 2019: I’ve been watching F1 races for the first time this season after having watched the 2 seasons of the Documentary Series Drive To Survive on Netflix. F1 is racing at Monza this weekend, so I wanted to do a few labs around to get a better sense of it for when I watch the race later. Why not F1 2020? 2019 is on Game Pass. Also, it’s strange to have Sebastian Vettel on the cover of the 2019 game while watching him qualify in 17th/20 racers in this weekend’s race.
Bloons Tower Defense 6: Sometimes I just want to see a bunch of balloons explode, Bloons TD is good for this. But also, sometimes your brain is in a bad place and you find yourself playing a time-killing game like this when you really ought to be doing anything else.