What is Shameless Gaming? Well, I’m glad you asked! Shameless Gaming is Kotaku’s version of Dry July, a month where we ignore new releases and play through our video gaming pile of shame together. We take all those unfinished, ignored games, the ones we cast aside, and we give them the attention they deserve! Join in!
I’ve stumbled across a slight problem. Despite having picked out a handful of games to play this month, I don’t know what to play.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first is that I cannot play StarCraft for extended periods of time. StarCraft 2 has taught me several useful habits for playing StarCraft. While it’s generally a good idea to constantly build workers and amass an army, it’s often unnecessary in a game that has missions where your goal is to take one character and some drop ships to a certain point on the map.
More than a few missions have ended with me feeling like a complete idiot for taking thirty minutes to do something that could have been done in five.
Compared to other games, StarCraft requires a considerable amount of concentration. When I come home from work, that’s not always the most appealing prospect.
The other problem is that I have finished two of the four games and the last game on my list, Dead Space, just doesn’t look very enticing right now.
It was time to start playing anything that seemed like a good idea.
First came Limbo. While very different from Shadow of the Colossus, Limbo felt oddly reminiscent of it at times. Seeing a rather simple game capture such a sense of loneliness was intriguing. It didn’t take long for me to complete this game and have to start searching for something new to play.
Just Cause 2, Machinarium and Crysis 2 were all tried. None of them managed to capture my attention for very long. Just Cause 2 isn’t a game made for completion, it’s there for grappling hook focused chaos. Point and click adventure games have never really appealed to me, so Machinarium didn’t win me over despite its charm. Crysis 2 just wasn’t fun.
I knew what I wanted to play. I wanted to play Half Life 2: Episode One.
There was a reason that I didn’t jump straight into Episode One after finishing Half Life 2, I don’t own it on PC. Somehow I have ended up with a copy of The Orange Box on Xbox 360 and Half Life 2 on PC. I played Half Life 2 on PC so it just feels right to continue the series on the same platform.
The only solution? Buy Episode One again through Steam. That’s what I did two days ago.
Now I’ve finished it and I face the problem of what to play again. It’s a good problem, I look forward to solving it.
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