Trying Something New – Weekly Gaming Check-in for 9/23/19

Daily Gaming Thoughts

Friends, if you’ve followed this blog, you know it goes through phases. Evolution, if you will. I try a daily thing, it falls off. Then it becomes a weekly thing. Then it because a maybe sometime thing. Well I’m trying something new today.

Today is the first of a weekly gaming check-in. I’ve found that trying to write basically the same thing every day puts a pressure on me that leads me not to do it. I’ve learned, in my streaming, that I need variety, so in that I likely need it with my writing as well, so this will be a weekly check-in to talk about gaming, what I’ve been playing, what I’d like to play, and what you’re playing.

Lately, due to the excitement of figuring out what to stream, I’ve been trying to get some old games running, most recently Deep Space Nine: The Fallen (which I was successful in getting to run) and Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars (which I wasn’t). Old games can be really fickle things. Sometimes they’ll install, but not run. Sometimes they’ll install and run just fine. Sometimes they’ll do NOTHING but mock you, saying “We can’t run this installer on a 64 bit operating system” or some such madness.

I DID have some success with one old game I never thought I’d get to run again: Jane’s USAF. A survey sim that’s a follow up to their Fighter’s Anthology, it’s an amazing sim, and it took a good hour of installing and patching — thanks to the PC Gaming Wiki — to get it running. It’s not PERFECT, as it flickers like hell at any resolution. Getting it to run in a window, so far, has been a failure. Still, progress!

I’m a bit sad that I’ve not gotten Dominion Wars to run properly, but not TOOOOOO sad, because apparently it’s not very good. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to find that out for myself. Star Trek games, if anything, can be a series of disappointments with greatness sprinkles in-between. Regardless, I’d like to see if I can get them to run.

My next experiment will be the Armada games, neither of which I’ve played, shockingly. I think I was burnt out on real-time strategy games at the time, and gave them a miss. This is odd because I LOVE RTS games. Regardless, I’ve got the disks here on a spindle with other games I plan to try to get running in order to stream, including:

• Sub Culture
• Warhammer: Battle March
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine
• Freedom Fighters

Also none of which I’ve played, but hear wonderful things about repeatedly. One thing I’m excited about with this streaming endeavor is that, rather than spending money I no longer will have on new games, it’ll help force me to play games I already own, which is what I should’ve been doing all along.

What I’ve Been Playing

• EF2000 – Since I got it running recently, I’ve been not only reading the manual, but going through its lengthy training missions — some of which you can see here — reminds me just how rusty I truly am. I can’t WAIT to finish reading its manual and strategy guide, plus going through all the missions, in order to stream it next week. It’s like spending time with an old friend one hasn’t seen in decades.

What I’m Planning on Playing

• CrossCode – I’ve been having fun with this ARPG, and I’m still in the very early stages of it, but I have to remind myself I own it in order to keep playing it. It’s really great!
• Deathtrap – In a discussion of tower defense games recently, I was reminded that I actually like them when you’re a participant on the battlefield, and this is one I really enjoyed then fell off from. I’m gonna revisit it to see if it’s fun and worthy of a LAN Party night.

So doing this weekly, plus other weekly articles, should flex my writing muscles a lot more, something I really need to do, because that’s how this whole shindig started, and as great as video is, the written word is still so important.

To wrap up, I’d love to know what you’re playing and what you’re excited about, gaming-wise, so hit me up in the comments. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this rant of mine.