I got up this morning and was awake before anyone else. I opened up the house and went into the game room and made an attempt at playing Dear Esther which I have been wanting to play for some time. I had tried it out and done maybe half of the first chapter some time ago, just to see how the game was. This was my first time with time to actually attempt playing it.
I got about an hour in when Liesl and Luciana woke up and came into the game room to join me. They watched me play for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes and really enjoyed the “game” even thought there is no game, just a walking simulator as I walk around a Scottish island. They felt that the graphics were so nice that it would be fun.
Both girls really wanted to get back to playing Final Fantasy III today so they talked me out of stopping Dear Esther about a quarter of the way through the final chapter. So I stopped playing so that we could switch and discovered that we were minutes away from completing Dear Esther and that none of it had saved and that I was going to have to play the entire game, again, from the beginning now. Impatience rears its ugly head once again. That was a lot of wasted time.
We got back into Final Fantasy III and this was our day. Nearly all of it. We played for almost ten hours! Liesl stayed with me for the entire day. Luciana put in a solid two hours, probably, at the beginning and then came in and out throughout the day to keep up with what was going on but not watching the game continuously.
We made really good progress and made it through the first two large sections of the game. Liesl was really into it and had a great time. She really followed the story and did a great job at understanding all of the battle mechanics. I think that we are going to have a good time playing the Final Fantasy series together. We own so many of them. At this point on Steam we own three, four, four part two, five, six, seven, eight, we are waiting on nine to release which is due very soon, and the three parts of thirteen. Eleven and fourteen are not real games so they can be ignored. The only ones that we don’t own are one, two, ten, ten part two and twelve – none of which is yet available on the PC. My guess is that one and two at the very least will be remade and rereleased very soon as next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the series and with nine coming soon, fifteen due to be made soon and the anniversary coming up this is a huge opportunity for them to get a lot of sales in. It would be a huge lost opportunity if they didn’t get the last five titles done for the PC. The first two are just “old” and need to get released. The ten and twelve series are from the Playstation 2 (and we own them on that) and likely need tons of work to make them viable on the PC. Likely they have to completely reword the graphics, engine and more to get them ready for release and they are anything but small games so doing so is likely an insane amount of work. But I can only imagine that they would sell like crazy, too. If they don’t release them on the PC they have nowhere at all to sell them with the PS2 long off of the market now. They need to release them or the opportunity is simply lost.
After ten hours on FF3 neither Liesl nor I was prepared to take much more. We beat the big salamander boss and shut it down moving on to Supreme League of Patriots that the girls and I have been playing. We did not have too much left to do on that before wrapping up episode one. So that is another game wrapped up and completed! The girls liked that one all of the way through. They miss a lot of the humour as it is a weird mix of super heroes and political humour.
We played a little bit of Puzzler World, too. Not a lot, just eight puzzles or so. Ciana did the fitwords, Liesl did the sudoku and link-a-pix. That game is huge so a little here and there is a good way to tackle it. We always save the few game types that Dominica enjoys just in case she ever decides that she is going to join us.
For our final game of the night we moved on to Robin’s Quest which is a Robin Hood themed hidden object game, one that I had gotten to test out when we were still living in Texas and is one of the first couple hidden object games that I ever tried out, but only played for less than twenty minutes so had never actually gotten into. Both girls really enjoyed this one and we easily put in two hours playing it.
Liesl does an awesome job of controller the main game. Like other games she learns her way around so quickly and can navigate the whole game without any problem and she is pretty good at nearly all of the puzzles. Luciana is really good at the hidden object portions and likes to control those. So we play as a team effort. It works great.
So my day was spent on the right hand side bed in the game room with my daughters snuggling with me all day. It was an awesome day. We played tons of stuff and had a great time spending time together. This is just about a perfect day. We all had a lot of fun. And Dominica got to spend the day on her own in the living room reading a book which is what she wanted. I don’t think that she even came into the gaming room all day.
Tonight Luciana decided that she really wanted to sleep in the bed with Dominica and Liesl so I got kicked out and had to sleep on the floor beside the bed.