I’m going to buy a game tomorrow afternoon. Technically I’m going to go buy an extension to a game. A game that’s been around for years and years which I have played many, many times before. In fact, if I can find them all (there will be three as of tomorrow), I’ll probably by all of the expansions to this game. The game is The Sims2, and the expansion that’s coming out tomorrow is Sims2: Open for Business.

I’ll be getting this game for two basic reasons: 1) Sims2 is fun to play in fits and starts, although on the whole it’s sort of frustrating and a little boring — maybe this expansion (and the others) will make it a little less frustrating and boring; 2) As far as I can tell, all new games suck.

Raph Koster, who is apparently some sort of MMORPG guru or something, wrote a little ranty blog post today called What are the lessons of MMORPGs today? If you’ve played any of those sorts of games you will laugh. Bitterly. And when you stop laughing bitterly, you might look grumpy for a little while when you think back to how much damned time you wasted playing the blasted things, trying to find the “fun” that you lost when you figured out the game mechanics. (Once you figure out the core mechanics it’s all just rote time-filling, which is a lot like, oh, work.)

Anyhow. As I said to someone yesterday, “if they’d just create a site full of strange little web-based Tycoon style games, I’d happily subscribe”. There are caveats, of course — each game would have to have different base mechanics and influencing variables so solving one didn’t solve them all — but otherwise I pretty much stand by that. I like puzzles. I like games that provide me a sense of accomplishment commensurate to the amount of effort (be it time, brain power, or ideally a combination of both) I put in. I really like games that I can pop in and play for 30-60 mins, by myself, with a sense of having accomplished something.

For what it’s worth, one of my favourite games of all time is, to this day, Ragnarok. I’d just about kill for a Rogue-like game for the Nintendo DS. Sigh.

Stupid games.