Last weekend was gaming heaven. I had a complete weekend all to myself. As soon as the wife and kids left, I positioned the easy chair in front of the tv, and booted up The Wither 3. As mentioned in an earlier post, I finished that, after which I took some time to reflect on the experience by browsing through the art books of the three Witcher games.

Then, I continued with God of War Ragnarok. I can only play this game in short bursts because the fights really gets the adrenaline pumping. While the puzzles in between the fights are mostly entertaining, they sometimes are breaking the immersion for me. And the corridor approach of the game doesn’t appeal to me. Some puzzles are a bit obtuse and those cause me to stop playing.

Luckily a few levels of Sydney Hunter prove a nice distraction. The first two games on the Evercade cart don’t have much appeal, but the third one certainly does. And although my recent purchase of reading glasses make it much nicer to play on handheld, playing on the VS makes it a lot easier to make progress. The pac-man style game is nice as well.

In between gaming sessions I finished the last chapter of The Art of the Box. I appreciate the nice large font of the main text, but the descriptions of the illustrations are too small. For those the new reading glasses really come in handy. Now to continue with another big book: 50 Years of Text Games. I actually got that before the other book, but haven’t read much yet.

After removing the Witcher disc, I found the Divinity Original Sin 2 disc in the case. I remember giving up on it after I lost a ton of progress after a system update. So in went the disc and before I knew it I was standing once again in a fire storm, because that’s what usually happens in most fights in DOS2. After an hour or two I was back where I was before the update and I spend a couple of hours more to make more progress. I’m now in the final act of the game and really looking forward to playing more. I really like how you can approach most quests in different ways, although I’m mostly not creative enough to figure smart solutions out. I do think the game is too long for me to play though in one session. This is actually the second time I took a break from the game. Maybe the fact that the game is divided in multiple chapters make this easier for me.

To make a great gaming weekend even better, some new arrivals turned up: Crystals of Arborea and Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. The Larry game is the last of the big box Larry games from the previous century that was missing from my collection. It’s absolutely packed with goodies, both 3,5 and 5,25 inch floppies for instance. The other game provides a shrill contrast. It only comes with a single disk, albeit in a rather nice sleeve, and a single page addendum to the manual, which itself is missing. It also is a small box variant, which is a bit disappointing, because it doesn’t look very nice next to it’s younger Ishar siblings.

Phew, that was a great weekend! That will probably not happen again anytime soon, but finishing DOS2 and GoWR before 2024 seems definitely possible. Playing all those new-ish games make me want to play more retro games though, so we’ll see what happens in the last months of 2023