February 11, 2016

This morning I was woken by a phone call from the public library. My volunteer application made it to the PR person and she called to tell me that February was a busy month but we set up a meeting on the first of March. And I put it in my phone because there is no way I will remember it.

A good portion of my day was spent working on the group assignment for class. It took a lot longer than I was expecting it to. I think most of that was due to having to click through a lot of different pages and trying the same thing on different sites. I got there in the end and was able to get all of the questions answered and sent it off to my partner. Later tonight he send it back with some of his notes. I'll look everything over more closely tomorrow and figure out what to do next. I think a draft is due Saturday before a class meeting and then the final version is due Sunday night.

I played Firewatch tonight and I was able to finish it. It took me just over seven hours to complete and that involved a whole lot of running around that was unrelated to the plot, so it is a really short game. And in the end it was very underwhelming. They elude to a big mystery and dangerous things but in the end the two main characters were really just getting worked up over nothing. The ending would have been far less disappointing if the theories for what was happening weren't introduced, because they were all far better than the actual ending. It's almost like they forgot to write the ending until the night before the game shipped so instead of flushing out some of their ideas they just wrote “The End” and called it good. It just felt incomplete and that is a shame because there was so much potential. The voice acting was good, the game looked fantastic, and I really liked wandering around in the world. I would have liked to be able to do more in the lookout tower. There is a lot of random stuff you can interact with but that only means picking it up and putting it back down. None of it really serves a purpose. I couldn't start a fire in the stove or make food or really do anything else. I was also a little disappointed to find out there wasn't an achievement involving the books. There are books scattered throughout the world in the supply boxes and several of them have a number in the title. They go one through nine and I hiked all over the place once I realized I could get them back to the lookout tower. I thought maybe there would be an achievement or maybe something would happen in the game if I collected them all. But there wasn't, which made it feel like at one point there was a point to them being numbered but then it was never added to the game. I couldn't even fit them all on the same row in my bookshelf. If I cut out most of my unnecessary wandering around the game would probably last well under five hours. Maybe even three to four. I don't regret pre-ordering it but I am disappointed. I wouldn't mind if they called for a do-over and gave the plot another shot in a (free) DLC. Or maybe filled the world with more things to do. At one point they tease you with the chance to go fishing but then they don't let you. Again, so much potential that just wasn't ever realized. I definitely won't be pre-ordering any games from this developer in the future, no matter how good they look. I'll have to wait and make sure they didn't botch the ending again.

Soon I'll be going to bed. Maybe. Tomorrow will involve some more schoolwork. I would also like to write a short essay for a scholarship. I've been meaning to do that for awhile though and I think it is due this weekend. I probably won't write it. Now that I'm done with Firewatch I would like to get back to sewing. I need to make some more bookmarks.