Warning, this is not a post about tavel or minimalist living. I swear, I will get back to that next month.
Sam Pirtle
Okay, I know I have been threatening to post about my going down the rabbit hole of Stardew valley for some time, so here we go.
It all started innocently enough. I watched a wonderful TED talk by James Veitch, about spam email. Of course it wasn’t long before I was on his YouTube channel digging through his other videos. I watched one (see it here) which totally convinced me that I never ever wanted to play StarDew Valley. As a matter of fact, I just watched the video again, and can’t see why it didn’t deter me from playing even a year later.
Back up to earlier in 2020, while I was in Arequipa, Peru; The rainy season had started and really didn’t feel like going outside for much of anything but buying food. I was burned out on this blog, because … well face it unending torrents of rain don’t make for good tavel blogging. As I very often do, I googled “iPad games like Pharaoh.” Pharaoh was the game I played unendingly in hotel rooms as I was waiting for ships. As usual I found nothing, but I did get a lead. I saw that someone, also bemoaning the loss of Pharaoh, referred to it as a “open ended role playing game.” So I googled “open ended role playing game for iPad.”
The result was “Stardew Valley.” I was like, is that the game that James Veitch panned so badly? I looked it up in the Apple App store, and decided that at the price it was worth a try. It met all my requirements . It was a building game with some elements of questing. It also (on the iPad version) lets you turn the combat to auto. It can be played alone or with others.
I am a real geek, I am not social. I don’t want real people in my computer games. I don’t have fast twitch responses that are good enough for most action computer games. This cuts me out of most modern games. What are left are games, like Mindcraft, which are just too unstructured for me. Stardew Valley seemed to be a good fit, so I started to play. I should have known that this game was going to be a problem for me when the first time I played it, I didn’t notice the time until the morning sun lit up my patio.
Along the way I have taken quite a few screenshots. I had planed to tell the tale using them. As I went through the images, I saw that there were many times when I was too busy to bother with screenshots. I have a confession to make. I actually didn’t start taking the screen shots to use in the blog, but to share with a friend about what the game was like. He is now hooked on it, though not as badly as me. The first images sent were quite far into the game.
I started this post with the idea that it would be just a recap of the lives I have played in Stardew Valley, but I realize that the post would be far too long, even for diehard SDV fans. I have played five lives complete in last seven months, not to mention the lives I goofed up and just deleted early on, and now see that I have never taken screenshots in the early parts of the game, only starting when I something to brag about. So I guess that is my excuse to go back to the beginning and play a sixth life?
I guess it does. I have now started another life going. Since I am going to be playing this life mainly for the screenshots, I think I should do a series of short posts as a traditional game walkthrough. Be forewarned, you might want to avoid my blog until the last two weeks of October. For the next month it should be all gaming all the time.
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