[jbunniii]

[Possible minor spoilers]

Over the last few days, I've been playing:

* Mean Streets (first Tex Murphy game). This is available for free on GOG, I believe through Christmas. This is definitely old-school. It's a bit weak really, for a detective game. And that's not because it's old: I've played (and failed to win) much harder text-only games from the 1980s such as Infocom's Deadline. But Mean Streets is fairly straightforward. As long as you take notes and follow up on every new name or location you encounter, it's hard to get stuck.

The "shooting" mini-game is, let's face it, pretty infantile, and the flight simulator part is completely pointless [I leave it on auto-pilot and wish it had a fast-forward option]. The only minor challenge so far is that some of the explorable rooms have burglar alarms that have to be turned off within 5 or 10 minutes, but the exploration options are so limited that it's never a problem to find the correct switch within the allotted time.

Anyway, I have all eight "quest items" that I need for the presumptive final showdown, so I imagine I'll wrap this up today.

All in all a fairly mediocre game, but hey, it's free [as is the follow-up, Martian Memorandum] and a somewhat novel gaming experience from today's perspective; it's sort of entertaining to have to take physical notes with pen and paper, though it would rapidly become unwieldy if the game were more complex. Also, I intend to play the rest of the Tex Murphy games [I believe GOG has all of them], so there's something to be said for starting at the beginning.

* Torchlight. I picked this up on sale for $10 on Steam over the weekend. I played through a good 20 levels of the dungeon, because by the time I recognized that the "normal" difficulty level setting is far too easy, I stubbornly didn't want to have to restart the game and figured that it would get tougher. Unfortunately, it didn't.

So I bit the bullet and restarted it on "very hard" [skipped right over "hard"]. Now I would say it's maybe a bit tougher than Diablo 2 on the "normal" setting, which is fine with me because I've played through Diablo 2 multiple times and this game is VERY similar.

Overall it's pretty fun on "very hard" and I guess it's novel to get to play "Diablo" with sharper graphics and better special effects. But it also lacks Diablo's dark/sinister feel and it's also dumbed down a bit in terms of character options. Also I liked Diablo 2's sprawling world better than playing through what is essentially one big dungeon [though I recognize that the same was true in Diablo 1]. So, long story short, I expect this will be off my hard drive within a year or two, whereas there will always be space for Diablo 2. [Heck, I haven't even done a full playthrough with all seven classes on NORMAL difficulty yet!]