New Year, New Games

As I've mentioned before, last Thanksgiving I took advantage of a Steam sale and bought a bunch of video games at a fraction of their usual cost - five or six games (depending on how you count sequels) for the price of one premium, first-run game.

As the Thanksgiving season transitioned to the Christmas holidays, I played Far Cry: New Dawn, a sequel to Far Cry 5, which I had completed earlier this year.   I wrapped that game up just as I lost power and my internet connection over Christmas Day.  

I've now unwrapped the second little present that I had left beneath my tree and have started on the 2016 reboot of the Hitman games.

It's basically a stealth game and far less violent than you'd think.  Sure, your whole mission is to perform a contract kill on someone, but you don't go in guns blazing and shoot everything that moves.  Pretty much as a rule, if you pull your gun out much before the climactic assassination of each mission, you lose.  

The game's more about sneaking undetected into some dangerous, exotic fortress without being detected, and figuring our clever ways to turn the mundane objects you encounter (overhead slide projectors, stage lights, toaster ovens, busts of Beethoven) into weapons or at least tools to get you closer to your target.  The stealth creates suspense and tension, so that even though the game is not ultra-violent (I'd kill more enemies and monsters on a walk around the block in The Outer Worlds than I would in an entire mission of Hitman), it can get intense.

Although the setting and stories were very different, I'd compare Hitman more to the Dishonored series than a first-person shooter game.

Why do I write about these games, you may wonder.  Easy - this blog is my journal, my web log, and I write about the games to help me remember what I played and when, and what else was going on in my life while I was playing.  

Same with music, same with books, same with sports.  Same with movies and television series. These are the times and this is my record of the time.    Life's not all about the ideas that float through your head during meditation.