Trjn’s Month Of Shameless Gaming: Week 2

This month could be going somewhat better. Instead of reducing my pile of shame, it has ever so slightly grown.

Instead of playing Dark Souls and Hotline Miami, as planned, I instead scratched an itch that I didn’t even know I had. Late last week, a friend gifted me a copy of Rogue Legacy on Steam. 10 hours of pixelated sword swinging later and I’m finally starting to feel less compelled to load that up every time I sit in front of the computer.

It seems to be against the spirit of Shameless Gaming Month to devote almost my entire gaming time to a shiny new game. That’s because it is.

Every time I sat in down in front of the computer, I was faced with the decision of playing Rogue Legacy, Dark Souls or Hotline Miami. Rogue Legacy managed to edge out the other games because it just happened to check more boxes. Feel like exploring? Well, that’s Rogue Legacy or Dark Souls. Something I unlike what I normally play? Rogue Legacy or Hotline Miami. Whatever criteria I try to apply, Rogue Legacy seemed to cover it.

Fortunately, the ultimate aim of Shameless Gaming Month is to have fun, not to be some labourious chore to grind your way through a stack of games you don’t want to play. Rogue Legacy is fun. Even though I’ve barely made progress on my pile of shame this week it does not feel like this week has been wasted.


That being said, I am slowly plodding along in Dark Souls. When I first played the game, I made it as far as the Capra Demon, a mini-boss relatively close to the start of the game. Right now I’m currently trying to get past the Bell Gargoyles in the Undead Parish.

The Bell Gargoyles are an early boss fight that can be rather devious because they fight in pairs. My main approach to combat has been to isolate enemies and then poke at them until they fall over. Hence my current predicament. During my last fight against the Bell Gargoyles, I tried the cunning plan of walking off of the roof that we were fighting on. This plan turned out to be as effective as it was cunning.

It does seem to sum up my experience with the game rather well though: unexpected and abject failure.

After that fantastic fight, I decided to do some exploring. My exploration lead me to Havel the Rock, a chunky mini-boss clad in heavy armour and wielding a massive dragon’s tooth as a weapon. One hit from him can kill even high level players but I thought that I’d try my luck. Five deaths later, I decided that maybe luck wasn’t the best thing to rely on.

As perverse at it seems, the harsh punishment for failure and the high frequency of it is what makes Dark Souls and Hotline Miami so great. There’s something strangely enjoyable about having everything go all wrong. With my interest in Rogue Legacy starting to wane, it’s time to scratch a more masochistic itch.

That’s how my Shameless Gaming Month is going so far, how about yours? Any tales of success or failure worth sharing? Any games discovered that turned out to be rather brilliant or mediocre?


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