Sunday, July 31, 2016

Vertiginous Golf - 5/20 hours

If I am to be 100% honest, the title of this post should probably be "Starbound - 30 hours." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it over the past few days, and have been "popping in to do just one more thing" so often that I've played it about twice as much as I have Vertiginous Golf.

It's not really Vertiginous Golf's fault, though. Three out of my four previous games have been ones I'd normally play for at least a hundred hours and I think something snapped. The urge to build overwhelmed me and I had to get it out of my system, lest I were to completely lose all hope.

However, I think things are back on track now. I've completed all of the standard and challenge courses and have only the story courses left to do. I've been waiting on doing the story missions because they're voiced and there hasn't really been a convenient time for me to listen to them (well, technically, there hasn't been a convenient time that I haven't been playing Starbound).

I have a creeping suspicion that I'm going to wind up spending most of my time making my own minigolf holes. I haven't actually tried that mode yet, but it's pretty much the only open-ended part of the game. Once I've finished the story mode, the only other thing I'll have left to do is replay the existing courses over and over again in the hopes of improving my score.

And the basic problem is that I'm simply not interested in golf. I mean, I don't hate this game or anything. It's just that I play it and I have no emotional reaction whatsoever. I make a difficult shot and it's like, "oh, that's nice." I miss an easy shot and I'm all, "Well, I'll just have to try better next time." One stroke over par, one stroke under par, what's the difference?

I need to figure out a way to get emotionally invested in Vertiginous Golf. Something that will get me thinking about it between sessions, instead of Starbound. A long-term creative project may well do the trick. I'm not sure what I'll do with my custom golf course once it's done, and I don't know if I have what it takes to design a clever puzzle, but the fact is that any activity that is capable of showing cumulative progress is going to beat out replaying the same few holes over and over again in the pursuit of a birdie for no reason other than to assuage my gaming pride.

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