Doing Everything But Playing WoW

And not for the lack of trying either. I've just been stuck in 4.72gig updates/downloads for a good 24 hours or more by now. I really don't know how 11 million Blizzard fans put up with WoW's patching.

I hear once Cataclysm comes in, they will significantly revise their patching system with some cues from games like Guild Wars, where all you need is a small download at the start, and you can stream the rest of the crap in the background as you are playing.

I hope so.

In the meantime, Steam has been proving a marvellous distraction as their Black Friday sales are offering all kinds of delicious deals for $5 usd. While it may not be on the same scale as vanilla WoW for $5, there's nothing like getting some games you were already eyeing at about 75% off. Especially the indie games.

One of the past indie packs is fantastic, because it offered Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, along with a few other games I had been intending to try (Gish, Jolly Rover, And Yet it Moves, etc.). Hell, for 5 bucks, I would have bought Recettear alone.

I took it for a spin, and I haven't laughed or enjoyed myself so much in ages. It's styled in a very typical Japanese anime style of game, with cutesy girl and cutesy fairy, yet with an amazingly witty and self-deprecating sort of English translation. (Thank goodness they kept the Japanese voices too, so it plays like a subbed anime.)

I could describe the premise - fantasy trope turned on its head by centering game and tale around being the proprietor of an item shop - but it doesn't do justice to the actual gameplay, which sports a blend of simplicity and polish in its mechanics.

It's part standard Japanese storytelling in the vein of Phoenix Wright and numerous Nintendo DS games (where you get a bunch of conversation exposition in text - a la Final Fantasy style), part turn-based visiting of other item shops to accumulate stock and a simple haggling menu of setting the appropriate numbers for buying and selling from your customers, and part very simple hack-and-slash dungeon crawl when you send your pet adventurer out to grab "free" items from dungeons (except you pay in terms of time and hope you don't screw it up from lack of arcade skill.)

I really should have tried the demo out long ago. Except if I did, then I might have bought it at a less cheap price, so maybe it's good I didn't.