Still Surfin'

I'm still playing through Titan Quest and Super Paper Mario. Titan Quest is getting iffier and iffier, but I'll save that for later. I just finished up another session of Audiosurfing.

I decided to play my golden oldies collection. Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra songs are sometimes fun, sometimes dull. Out of all of them, I'd say "Luck Be A Lady" was my runaway favorite. But there's still a little cognitive dissonance to that assessment. I like L-O-V-E way more "in real life". But it's not really that great in Audiosurf. All these fairly down tempo songs are getting me antsy for something with some kick. Some Bad Religion may be in order. BWAAAHAHAhahaaaa!

Back to Titan Quest, the game isn't very demanding. I'm still listening to podcasts as I play. Now that I've ripped some of my CDs to the hard drive, I'm also listening to music. And I'm thinking about the game less than the music. I kept thinking, "I wish I'd ripped my Peter Gabriel. I'd love to listen to that right now". I think that may be the official point where a game has completely failed to hold my interest. The problem is, I decide when to get new abilities in Titan Quest, and I'm a completist, so I'm not going to get new abilities until I've maxed the good ones I already have.

So is it Titan Quest's fault that I'm bored stupid, or mine? It's probably both. Obviously my OCD is my own problem. But the fact that Titan Quest provides no incentives to explore the skill tree is a design problem. And now that I'm in the early 20s, levelwise, the rate I get skill points to experiment with is a demoralizing trickle, especially considering I have to split them between two classes.

They do have places where you can reassign points. But I like my abilities. I bought them for a reason. Plus changing them would be too confusing. Gear is confusing enough already. Every time I change gear, I gain and lose resistances. My stats fluctuate based on gear as well. And at the end of the day I rarely seem to kill things or take damage so much faster or slower that I care. All the gear drops are completely random, so it's never worth it gear for the encounters. If my gear is bad for the encounter, I pop a lot of health potions. If it happens to be good for the encounter, I don't.

Again, Sid Meier said that the purpose of games are to give the player interesting choices. Titan Quest does that well in the beginning, but it's running on fumes in what I'm assuming is the mid to late game. Part of the problem may be that you can run through the game multiple times on higher difficulties, keeping all your abilities. The creators may have designed the skill system more towards the end end endgame. Meh.