Mobile Games and Me – How Theme and Large Numbers Carry an Experience

It’s been some years since I first saw my brother first playing a little Star Wars related mobile game called Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. I peeked curiously every now and then as he dug out his phone to do his daily grind for a game in which you compose a team of either light or dark side (and in some cases a combination of both) to fight waves of enemies or other players. Sometimes I asked about the game, how it was balanced, how pay-to-win it was, how often do you actually get to play the game, etc. The fact that my brother would go on to explain things in detail, quite excitedly, helped further my interest in the game.

Man Sitting on the Sofa Holding a Mobile Phone

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

I had seen one of my friends play similar games (with more of a East Asian style to them, however), but I didn’t really want to get involved due to how pay-to-win these sorts of games tend to be. In addition to that, the fact that these games are designed to manipulate you into using the product daily, to make it part of your daily rhythm, is something I quite dislike, but this is how pretty much everything is designed these days: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. As much as I (and many others) dislike it, the conditioning works because that’s just how our brains work. As we say in Finnish: apinaa koijataan (or “monkey is being bamboozled”). Those who this doesn’t work on are quite lucky in my opinion – you’re the smarter primates. Whatever the case, I had been looking for something little to add to my daily routine, so why not an addictive Skinner box? 

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Icewind Dale – That’s a lot of Snow

So I’ve gone through both Baldur’s Gate games and enjoyed them despite their flaws. I thought I would have taken a break from CRPGs, but I ended up just continuing on into Icewind Dale right after finishing Baldur’s Gate 2. This time the first game that I had was the Enhanced Edition (by Beamdog), and the second one was the regular edition Icewind Dale 2 as no Enhanced Edition for it exists (nor apparently can exist).

Now, I was expecting something similar to Baldur’s Gate, but some things ended up being a bit different from what I had gotten used to, most likely because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone of playing Good and Neutral characters. Let’s get into it then, shall we?

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Baldur’s Gate II – Some Thoughts

Intro

So I never got into some of the praised classics from the late Nineties and Two-thousands until fairly recently. I finished, for example, Deus Ex back in 2011 and Final Fantasy VII in 2016. I only finished Baldur’s Gate in 2017, and now, in 2018, I’ve managed to complete Baldur’s Gate 2.

The logo for Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn

All of these games have held up quite well despite the passage of time in my opinion, despite some of their janky mechanics from a modern standpoint. It can easily be seen why they are considered classics. But today I wanted to focus my post on Baldur’s Gate 2 because I felt rather strongly about it. The feelings were both positive and negative. I will begin with the positive and go on through to the obnoxious things.

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