So last month was my birthday. One of the gifts I received from my from my wonderful wife was several gift cards for ThinkGeek. In the past she had given me the same gift and I was able to pick up several interesting items off of their website. So with a lot of excitement I pulled up the ThinkGeek website… only to be sorely disappointed. It had been several years since I had been to the site and it was a shell of what it use to be. Only a handful of items and none of them interesting. The really off the wall geek items use to be available on ThinkGeek. However once it was taken over by GameStop, the number of items was cut back to nothing.
Luckily for me, the local GameStop would take the gift cards for any purchases. So the next question was, what would I pick up. They had the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition starter set, but no other books. I would have picked up anything if it had been available. A bunch of Funko Pop stuff, which I don’t collect. Some other nick-nacks, which again were uninteresting or too expensive. And of course a lot of video games. I’ve been more of a computer gamer than a console gamer. I’ve played a few games that I’ve enjoyed on the Nintendo systems. I had yet to find an XBox 360 game that has kept my attention. My college age kid loves several PS4 games and there were a lot of them in the store. But again, how do I make sure I get a game that I’ll actually enjoy. I left the store and started doing some different searches on PS4 games. And I thought I had found one.
As it turns out, Blizzard has released a re-master of the Diablo II game. I loved this game on my PC several years ago since no two gaming sessions were the same. The first Diablo game had also been very enjoyable, but Diablo III on the XBox 360 was… well just there. It didn’t grip me like Diablo II had. I haven’t had a chance to play Diablo II recently as my laptop is still a hold-over from school. The advertisements stated that the game was available for the PS4. So that was going to be my choice. I had some back up ideas based off of several video game articles I had read, but the re-mastered D2 is what I wanted.
So a few days ago I went back into my local GameStop and talked with the employee. She looked up the game and discovered that they did not have it at all. They didn’t even have any “coming soon” options. So I looked around for some of the backup ideas.
I had read some good reviews on the Dishonored series and a game called Prey. It had been recommended in an article for fans of stealth type games like the No One Lives Forever series. Luckily all of the games were in one collection. I had been looking at a few other options such as Wolfenstein and other titles I had recognized. But then the Baldur’s Gate series jumped out. This was a game based off of 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was enough that I pulled the trigger on both sets.
Since the Dishonored set was brand new, I elected to wait on that game. Baldur’s Gate was used so I wanted to check it out first just in case it didn’t work. So far I’ve actually been impressed. It feels like I’m playing a 2nd edition game. There have been several THAC0 references and some familiar spells. As I was going through the tutorial, I kept looking to the left where my gaming shelf was and wondered if I should pull out the 2nd edition AD&D player’s handbook for reference. I just might do that in future gaming sessions.
So I’ve found a game that I can hop on and play for a few hours. This should help distract me when I want to stop thinking about things for a while. I’ll report on the other games as I get a chance to play them.