StaceyPowers

I was posting in another thread asking what games people like to play when feeling down. I was half-surprised when @Shagger and @LadyDay both mentioned that they tend not to play games when they are feeling down, and prefer other activities instead. Gaming is pretty much my go-to activity especially when I am feeling anxious, depressed, fatigued, etc. It gives my brain something to latch onto and offers some structure and routine. So, this made me curious to ask everyone here. When are you not in the mood to game? When you are sad? Angry? Bored? Scared? Distracted? Excited about something else? What moods make your console or PC look totally unappealing?

If there is one thing I fixate on when I am playing a linear game, it is resource management. Nowhere is this more stressful for me than The Last of Us, where I obsess about how I can get through every situation using as few valuable health kits or bombs as possible. It’s because I always visualize getting to a key fight where there is no way for me at my skill level to possibly prevail without the resources I need, only to find I don’t have them and am never going to be able to progress. Having played successfully through TLOU, I know that my resource management fears are exaggerated. But nothing really stops me from worrying about it, even on a second playthrough. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for me to successfully get through a hard fight only to voluntarily re-play it if it hasn’t yet auto-saved just so I can conserve a single bomb or health kit. Mostly though, I just wonder if my resource management anxieties are completely unrealistic, or whether it is possible to wind up in a situation where you just don’t have what you need to proceed. Has this ever happened to anybody in any game? Which game, and how much progress did you lose? Sometimes I wish games would flash a warning at you if the game determines you are about to proceed poorly stocked, like, “Warning: If you proceed at this point, you are likely to have a very hard time making further progress. Would you like to replay from the last checkpoint?” What do you think of this idea? I feel like situations which would warrant such a warning would be relatively rare, so it wouldn’t be all that disruptive, and you could always switch it off in the options. @skyfire @Alyxx @DylanC @The Blackangel @killamch89 @kingpotato @Shagger @Crazycrab @LadyDay

I just got to a rare timed mission in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I actually kind of like it, since it isn’t the entire mission that is timed, just sections of it, and the reason for the time limit makes sense logistically and arguably enhances immersion in the situation. That being said, for me, putting up with this is an exception—usually I hate timed missions. And the worst of all for me are timed games. They instantly make me feel stressed. It is also hard to predict how much time you have for each segment of the mission or game, so you have to rush through everything by default at full speed, and you never get a chance to appreciate all the details. It is easy to miss a ton of content that way. The one that stuck in my memory as driving me crazy this way as a kid was Wishbringer by Infocom (a text adventure). As a small child, the time limit was enough to stop me from ever getting through the game successfully, though I believe it is one of the easier Infocom games. How do you feel about missions or games which are timed? Do you love them, loathe them, or are you more neutral in how you feel about them? @skyfire @Shagger @DylanC @Alyxx @Crazycrab @LadyDay @The Blackangel @killamch89 @kingpotato

One cat and many plushies.

What video game songs get stuck in your head most, and which drive you crazy? I think the absolute worst one for me is the song that plays the entire time you are in Orzammar in Dragon Age: Origins. It is quite an energetic song for something that you have to listen to for such a loooong time, and after hearing it loop enough times, I feel like putting my fist though a wall. It then loops on and on and on while I try to fall asleep at night. Another one that can get bad is the combat music in Skyrim. Most music in Skyrim does an amazing job not getting stuck in my head or not annoying me of it does, but if I get stuck in combat for like 20-30 minutes in a hard fight and that song has looped the whole time, I find it is super annoying and sticks there for a long while afterward. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen so often that I have felt a need to switch it off, and normally it doesn’t bother me when I just hear it for a couple of minutes. In general, it seems like compositions which are “active” and “purposeful” are the worst earworms. Oh, heh, another one that gets stuck in my head relentlessly is “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” since it is featured so prominently in Fallout: New Vegas. At first that annoyed me, but then I just sort of surrendered to inevitability and eventually stopped caring that it is constantly going through my brain. @The Blackangel @Alyxx @killamch89 @kingpotato @Crazycrab @Shagger @LadyDay @DylanC @skyfire

After @The Blackangel revived a thread where I asked whether we prefer blank slate characters that we build from the ground up versus pre-established characters, I thought of more questions to ask. Now I want to ask what makes a pre-established character relatable to you as a gamer? Do you relate to a character or not based on demographic traits, i.e. age, sex, ethnicity, orientation, etc.? Do you relate to a character or not based on personality traits? Do you relate to a character or not based on similar life situations? Do you relate or not based on values? For me, what makes a character relatable is all based on values, personality and situational factors. I don’t care what a character looks like or what their demographics are, though I know that a lot of people probably do. Mostly I just relate or not based on how a character responds to the events taking place around them. Like the character I most instantly connected to in any video game is Booker DeWitt from BioShock Infinite. His reactions to Columbia were instantly easy to connect with, and even though I obviously have not had any life experiences remotely like his, I just “got” him. What about you? What makes you relate to a character? And what factors are irrelevant to you when it comes to relating to a character?

@The Blackangel just resurrected one of my threads asking whether one prefers a "blank slate" character or one which has an established personality. While re-reading the responses, I came up with another question. In terms of pre-created characters with full histories/personalities/etc., are there any characters you have controlled in games that you found particularly difficult to connect to? I got to wondering this because @kingpotato and @killamch89 both expressed a strong preference for blank slate characters, and I wondered if it is in part because of difficulties in relating to pre-established characters. I usually don’t have too hard a time relating to pre-established characters I’ve played. I think the character I have the hardest time connecting to is Marston in RDR, but ironically I think that is because they gave him a very “neutral/non-committal” personality to provide more freedom in how he is played. Even with that being the case though, I still don’t feel all that challenged to connect to him.

In games that have endings (i.e. you aren’t playing an open world game which you can play forever after completing the main questline), how do you pace yourself with the main story missions or quests? I tend to avoid main story missions for long periods of time because I’m afraid that I’ll accidentally rush through a game. I guess the obvious solution is to look up the list of missions/quests to see how many there are, but I am always afraid of accidentally seeing spoilers in the mission names if I do this. What about you? Do you look up the list and then pace yourself accordingly? Or do you guess and try to go through the missions at the pace you figure the game intends (sometimes you can guess based on context clues in the game)? Or do you avoid the main story until you feel pretty sure you have done most everything else and won’t miss anything? The other relevant issue here is levels. It can be pretty annoying to charge into a mission when you are way below the intended level on mistake—but it can be equally bad to wait too long only to find that a mission’s enemies have leveled up to being ridiculously hard to beat despite your own high level. @skyfire @LadyDay @The Blackangel @kingpotato @Alyxx @killamch89 @Crazycrab @DylanC @Shagger

I’ve been having a rough few days, and have been more or less clinging to Dragon Age. I think this is a habit I picked up from another friend who also tends to absorb herself in Dragon Age when she’s feeling anxious or having other difficulties. It is a good game for it, since it is easy to immerse oneself in the detailed world of Thedas and its characters. What about you? When you are feeling down for whatever reason, are there any games in particular that you tend to play a lot? @The Blackangel @Alyxx @kingpotato @killamch89 @DylanC @LadyDay @Shagger @Crazycrab @skyfire

That's a really great question, but I can't think of an answer. If there were something that could increase empathy, I think that would be most useful. Link, maybe? If I were any of the three children, I'd disown anything to do with their worthless arses. Single-handedly keeping my life from falling apart. Not like I'd take an exit from my life to avoid the responsibility--it'd just be nice to have even a small safety net.

There's nothing wrong with having no preference. You do mention "ups and downs" for each though. What are they for you?

Video game universes are full of silly illogical things. Do these things annoy you? Or do you just find them funny? Or do you tend to miss them? For example, consider games like Skyrim or Dragon Age where you are plunging into caves all the time, most of which contain a liberal amount of lit candles and torches. This becomes pretty odd when you stop to think about it. Who is lighting all these things? Darkspawn? Draugr? Where are they doing their shopping for supplies? Where are they crafting them? There is even a joke about this in the Dragon Age Origins Awakening expansion, where someone says something while examining a lit torch like, “How does it keep doing that over all these years? Is there something special about the bracket?” I tend to find these things more funny than irritating, but I know some people may get annoyed by logical holes like these. Where do you weigh in? What are some similar examples of illogical things you have noticed in games? @kingpotato @LadyDay @Crazycrab @Shagger @killamch89 @Alyxx @The Blackangel @skyfire

In another thread, I mentioned how overburdened my Skyrim characters tend to be, particularly in the potions department, and @Crazycrab said that he only carries about 5 of each type of potion. So, this question is directed partly at @Crazycrab , but at anyone who plays Skyrim. Do you have any tips for keeping inventory weight low, especially with regards to the potions? I know I definitely carry way more potions than I need, but there are fights where I sometimes am downing health potions or magicka potions like crazy. So, the tendency is to stock up constantly on both “just in case.” How did you figure out how many potions were ideal for you to carry in terms of balancing need for potions with the desire to save space in your inventory? Also, if you carry only a few health potions, how do you compensate? Perhaps you simply play a lot better than me. But do you use healing spells a whole lot? Run away a whole lot if you then run out of magicka? @kingpotato @LadyDay

After reading a thread from @killamch89 recently about more terrible support for Fallout 76, I got to wondering how many other games can compete with Fallout 76 when it comes to epic launch/support fails. Can anyone think of examples that are even worse?

Do you play most of your games on a console or on a gaming PC? If you had a choice and ALL of your games could be on either type of platform, would you opt to play exclusively on PC or console, or would you prefer a mixture of both? I have a few games on PC that aren’t on console, but at this point, if I could play everything on console, I would. I find the controller and the setup more ergonomic, and I prefer my larger screen. @LadyDay @DylanC @The Blackangel @Alyxx @skyfire @Shagger @Crazycrab @kingpotato @killamch89

In another thread, @Crazycrab and I were talking about how The Last of Us arguably could never be as good in a film format as it is in a video game format. Personally, I think that the reason for this is in part the sheer simplicity of the story. It is the kind of story that on a screen, I think some people would be left asking “Is there more …?” But in a video game, it worked brilliantly. This got me thinking about what makes for a good story in a video game. What do you look for in order to say that you really enjoyed a video game’s plot? My favorite video game stories are TLOU and the BioShock games. TLOU has a very simple, minimalist plot, whereas the BioShock games have fairly elaborate storylines. So, I think for me, how a story is told counts for more than the complexity or simplicity of a storyline in a game. What these stories do have in common is a strong focus on characters along with a focus on examining moral choices. So I guess that must be what I like in video game stories. What about you?

Over time, it has occurred to me that there are many large cheese wheels throughout the Dragon Age franchise, and that there are some odd jokes involving them, the most prominent being a fully functional shield made out of a piece of cheese in DA:I. I have looked this up, and many people are aware of the cheese jokes. But I haven’t found an explanation for what prompted BioWare to make a running joke about cheese wheels in their games. Does anyone know how these cheese jokes started? @DylanC

For those of you who have purchased many consoles over the years, what do you do with them? Have you kept them all? Have you sold some of them? Have you given some of them away? What makes you decide to sell/give one rather than hang onto it? @The Blackangel @DylanC @skyfire @killamch89 @kingpotato @LadyDay @Alyxx @Crazycrab @Shagger

I’m playing Dragon Age Inquisition, and it is a very fun game with which I am overall satisfied, but it seems to have a lot of “distracting” content. I usually am all for “game of a million side quests,” and don’t mind gathering resources, etc. yet somehow the million side quests in DA:I seem more distracting/tedious than interesting/fulfilling. So, I find myself ignoring more and more of them as I play so that I am not spacing out important plot events and character interactions so much. Thus, the game flows a bit better and I feel more connected to the world. Are there games where you find yourself ignoring content on purpose in order to make the game, well, better?

I like the DualShock 3, though not its price or apparent fragility, but it handles smoothly and that is nice. My least favorite controller I ever remember using was the one with my original NES when I was a kid. Something about the lack of thumsticks I think made it almost unusable for me. I thought I was terribly uncoordinated and just a horrible gamer when I was a kid, but sometimes I think if the NES had come up with a completely different kind of controller, I probably would’ve played significantly better (but still been pretty bad). @The Blackangel Especially interested in what you have to say on this topic since I know you have used a lot of different systems over the years.

It is possible to cheat at poker in RDR, of course, but I am wondering, is the player the only person who does? Or do the other gamblers ever cheat at poker? I am guessing the answer is “no,” but sometimes I wonder. Occasionally an npc seems to be on an unbelievable run of luck. @kingpotato

I don't think my family had any original recipes.

Not knowledgeable enough to answer.

Favorite item of clothing you own?

You're going to be on Jerry Springer. What person will you be fighting with on the show?