To finish out last weekend's - and apparently this weekend's, too - grudge posting, my bad mood over missing decals and checks and over broken household appliances was exasperated by my disappointment in the BioShock Infinite video game and that the NieR: Automata game wouldn't work on my PC, despite mods, patches and various adjustments to my computer. Games are my escape from the tedium and banality of day-to-day reality, and are not supposed to be irritants in and of themselves.
Therefore, I eventually just gave up on NieR. I can't refund it because I played some four hours trying to fix it (Steam only allows two hours of gameplay to allow a refund), so I just deleted the game from my hard drive to save disc space and left the game in my Steam account for some future download when I either have a new PC or am in the mood to fuss over it for a full day (or when I find credible instructions on how to fix it that don't involve tweaking my entire Windows OS).
So instead of just replaying the old games (again), I sated my appetite for virtual escapism by downloading the Dishonored game. So confident was I that I would like the game and that it would work, I purchased the entire bundle: the original Dishonored and the subsequent sequels Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.
Outsider, the most recent of the three, downloaded first and I opened it and started playing just to make sure it worked. It did, beautifully, and the game had everything I liked - realistic graphics, an intuitive control system, and even though I only played a few minutes, an apparently interesting story line. It's a stealth game - your missions are generally to sneak undetected into enemy territories and take out villains, and attempts to fight more than about two enemies at a time usually end up in your character dying. The highly enjoyable Assassin's Creed Origins was also a stealth game, so in that regard it's the perfect follow-up, a much better choice after Origins than the first-person shooter BioShock.
I closed the game as the other downloads continued because I wanted to play the series in order. As I'm playing through the first Dishonored this week, I'm realizing that even in the few minutes of Outsider that I played there were a couple of spoilers. Not enough to ruin the game, but a few references that make me realize that some of the "bad guys" I'm fighting in Dishonored later become "good guys," and vice versa I assume. Dishonored is a little bit dated, it came out in 2012, and the graphics and actions aren't as smooth as in Outsider, but that's okay (I've played far worse), and as I play forward through the series, I can look forward to better and better performance and graphics. So that's cool.
So all is well in my little world. I can drive to the office - legally - and work all day, and then drive home - legally - and at night pretend I'm a Loyalist assassin taking out enemies of the Empress one by one. And then do the same thing, over and over again, all day, probably for the rest of the year based on the sheer volume of Dishonored games now on my laptop.
Isn't life grand?
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