gali

Work has been taking a lot of time and energy of late, and so hopefully only a short(ish) post today.

Back when I first discovered video games (I can just about remember the awe me, my brothers and family were in at unboxing an original NES and plugging in the original Super Mario Bros) things moved quickly. When the Game Boy came along, I remember enjoying Tetris for the novelty of handheld gaming, but quickly being drawn in by games with large worlds to explore and stories to be told. I can recall being surprised that my father was very taken by puzzle games that he could pick up and play for 5 minutes such as the aforementioned Tetris, though he would often not return my Game Boy to me until the batteries were almost dead. Nonetheless, I couldn’t grasp what he saw in such games.

Now time has moved on. I am no longer a kid with more spare time than he knows what to do with. I am no longer able to choose to wake up, turn on a console, and play games until I go to sleep. I have other interests, other priorities, a day job, and (most importantly) a life away from consoles. Don’t get me wrong, I can still spend hours – days even – getting absorbed in a computer game. I’m a self-confessed Final Fantasy-aholic, and currently find myself pushing 50 hours of gameplay on the recently released Dragon Age: Origins while I await Square’s big release in March next year.

And yet, I find myself with short periods of time – the bus ride to work, waiting for friends to arrive to join me for my lunch break at work, the 20 minutes that finish the day where I finally relax towards slumber. Sometimes this time is filled with reading a book, sometimes its filled with a little web browsing or chatting to friends online. Quite often its filled with what are commonly referred to as casual gaming in modern terminology – games like Tetris, or Lemmings, or Bejeweled, or whatever. They are games that can be picked up for 5 minutes, enjoyed, and potentially put down… or played for hours. Sometimes they are simple, repetitive games of skill (such as Bejeweled), and sometimes they have depth and progression on par with hardcore roleplaying games (Puzzle Quest, anyone?)

And so, as my habits and needs have evolved, I find myself easily lost in casual games. I refuse to let go of my interest in the blockbuster console/PC titles out there – doing so would leave me squarely in the territory of my parents, able to pick up the simpler casual games, but not being interested in diving into games with stronger learning curves, complex game mechanics and deeper stories. Not content with one platform for exploring casual games, I find myself armed with a PSP, a Nintendo DS, my mobile phone (the N97) and my iPod touch… the latter two of which including more content through their App Stores and downloadable games than you can shake a stick at. And, of course, my laptop/PC has access to a Plethora of Flash games and other small bits of freeware that sit squarely into casual gaming.

So with Tetris a distant memory and Peggle just about behind me, I look to the games that are occupying those short spots of time, and find my iPod touch in my hand most of the time. GeoDefense (and its sequel GeoDefense Swarm), Dungeon Hunter and Flight Control find themselves at the forefront of my attention.

And that’s all I want to say for now. I may come back to look at the games I’m playing in more detail at a later date…