After nearly 200 hours, I'm finally at the point in Vintage Story where I'm in a position to to the (vintage) story. I have some teleportation stones (from the Ruststones mod) charged up so I can make the dozens-of-miles-long trek north to the Resonance Archive to figure out what's going on with it. I'm glad I discovered there's an overland route, so I don't have to make a canal to the northern ocean. In a couple weeks, I should have a review and I can move on to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. The real reason is that I'm hitting the same wall I usually hit in these long games. It happened when I played my heavily modded games of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (each of which took about 200 hours), it happened in Stardew Valley, it happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it's when I start off very excited, and I make big plans, and I stretch out the gameplay as long as I can, and then there comes a time when my motivation just...peters out, and I start rushing headlong toward the end so I can finish. There's no specific point where the switch is thrown, and I can predict when it will happen. In Vintage Story, I had a bunch of plans for what I was going to do when spring finally came again, all the crops I would plant and the upgrades I did to my greenhouse to prepare for it, and now it's looking like it'll be pointless because I'll beat the game before it's warm enough to put any seeds in the ground.

Some of this is just that I'm doing too much of the same thing and want a change. For example, it didn't happen in Baldur's Gate II. Maybe because I played it in bits in between the other things I'm doing. On the other hand, even though there's a whole route and revamped content in Night in the Woods that I haven't done yet, I haven't gone back to it yet after eight years. And this is in contrast with literature--there I often don't want a book to end, and I know some of that is because I write reviews of all the books I read so finishing a book means I have homework, but I also write reviews of all the games I play so there's no difference there. And of course, books obviously don't take 200 hours to read unless you're reading the Talmud or something, and Daf Yomi means you stretch that out like I stretched out my Baldur's Gate II playthrough. So what is it?

Okay, between this paragraph and the previous one I stared out the window for a while and you know, I actually thought of a possible explanation--action. Video games are an active medium, they require you to do things to complete them. Even the most text-heavy visual novel requires you to make a plot-relevant choice occasionally. Books (and TV shows etc) don't require any action, they just require absorption of information. So maybe what I'm actually getting sick of is the repetitive actions, and what's more, the constrained possible range of actions. In Vintage Story I can move blocks around, explore, craft, fight monsters, farm crops, and so on...but there are very few NPCs to talk to, no character sheet to level, no job classes to pick, etc. The mechanics have been basically the same for those entire 200 hours and what I really want is a set of new mechanics. Order of Ecclesia has platforming challenges, gimmick boss fights, and killing monsters for their glyphs. Vintage Story has...well, I've heard it does have a gimmick boss fight but it doesn't have any of the rest of those. It'll be a big change.

You know, I didn't actually expect to come up with a real answer when I sat down to write this, but it also explains why I tend to pick very different games. Just look at the list of games I played in 2024 and you'll notice I never played the same type of game twice in a row. The closest were River City Girls and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but the former was a co-op beat-'em-up and the latter was almost a metroidvania, so they were still very different. What I'm looking for is mechanical variety.

Today was the parental information session for new families at Laila's new school, and while I couldn't go, I watched Laila while sashagee went. It ran over the hour they had set and sashagee didn't get to grab any coffee before she came home, but she took copious notes. Among those notes:

• It's an International Baccalaureate school, so it follows a standardized curriculum through all of its instruction (preschool through middle school).
• The school has a whole system of communications that goes through tiers, from emails and website announcements and fliers home and so on.
• There are a bunch of parent groups you can join, including some Facebook groups she said I should join.
• Breakfast and lunch are offered but optional, important because sashagee wants to make meals for Laila.
• There will be a "welcome back" day where we can take a tour of the school.

Something else that stuck out in her memory was overhearing a conversation about the condo to the south of us that was just on sale. A month or so ago, we were walking out on the sidewalk and I heard some people outside the condo showing say they already had twenty offers. Today, sashagee said she heard other people talking about wanting to move into the neighborhood to secure their kid a spot at the local school for kindergarten since if you're already in the school you don't have to change mid-year and it's possible that you'll get to stay in future years (depending on the school administration, how many students the school has, their admissions policies, the phases of the moon, and so on), and that the same condo had closed with over thirty offers and gone for 120K over asking price! Once again, me being very lucky has worked out in my favor--just a few blocks over and we'd be in another school district, none of which are as good as our local one.

Canadian wildfires once again:



If you can't read Japanese, that's 154 on the AQI scale, which is moderate pollution (中程度の汚染), which is not good. I haven't been outside since Wednesday and don't plan to go out unless I have, though Laila is getting pretty annoyed about not being able to go outside.

It's supposed to last for the next couple days. Hopefully that's all--two years ago we lost most of the summer to Canadian wildfires. Hopefully our neighbors to the north can get the fires contained soon and not too much damage is done.

So on Tuesday, I went with sashagee to get Laila registered for preschool, while Laila was still out at the grandparents. When we got there, there were a bunch of people in line ahead of us, and while waiting in line I realized that we didn't have a printout copy of our proof of income, so I downloaded a PDF on my phone and got ready to argue about access to a printer or an email address to mail it to. Then it turned out when we got to the front it didn't matter--the woman doing the registering couldn't seem to find Laila in the system, and when she started talking with sashagee it seemed there was a miscommunication somewhere. See, sashagee had registered Laila for half-day preschool, and the system--knowing Laila was four years old since this was after putting in all of her information--had let her. At the school, we were told that half-day preschool was only for three-year-olds and that she would have to talk to the Office of Early Childhood Education to get things sorted out.

sashagee was understandably upset by this, and went home and made some calls. A call to the school wasn't returned (I don't think we ever got that email back that we were supposed to get...) but a call to the family hotline told her that since we had applied to half-day preschool, and had received an acceptance notice for half-day preschool, they had to take her. She just might be in a class with three-year-olds.

Armed with this knowledge, sashagee sent off an email explaining things to the contact she had and then she (and Laila since she was back) went back to the school on Thursday to re-register while I was at work. She left fifteen minutes before registration opened (the school is within a few minutes' walk) and was gone until fifteen minutes after registration closed, and when she came back she told me a wild tale. There had been one person ahead of her and the same person doing the registration, and when the person ahead of her was finished, the woman saw sashagee, said hello, and went back into her office and just...didn't come back. After thirty minutes the security guard went back to see what was going on and someone else came out and finished Laila's registration no problem, other than reiterating that she'd probably be in a class with three-year-olds.

Unbelievable. Just wild unprofessionalism. And I bet we'll have to deal with this woman again too, since this is our neighborhood school. Hopefully Laila's actual preschool experience goes better than her registration does!