The Games I Play

I rarely play games these days, mostly because I only use a Mac now. With no Windows environment, I haven't played PC games.

I sold my Windows PC last year, making a small profit as RAM and drive prices rose. At the time I had a 7800X3D and a 9070 XT, which ran basically any AAA game smoothly in 4K. The game I played most before selling it was Monster Hunter Wilds. It's actually pretty good, but I wasn't that into it. I just played it with friends.

There are games I do like. My taste is pretty simple: real-time strategy, roguelikes, and city builders.

The best-known real-time strategy series is probably StarCraft. I'm a longtime StarCraft player, though not a strong one. I started playing it in middle school because Lu Mingfei, the protagonist of Dragon Raja, plays it, and when I later got a computer, I picked it up.

But middle school wasn't when I first met real-time strategy. In elementary school, I played one called Stronghold Crusader at my great-uncle's house. It was really fun, and as a kid I was hooked. But that was a pirated copy. After I got to college, I paid twelve yuan on Steam to buy the real thing.

What's fun about real-time strategy is the contest between players. Based on each player's choices, new decisions and actions arise every second, and the back-and-forth between attack and defense is thrilling.

I remember one time at an internet café, I met a guy playing StarCraft II. These days hardly anyone plays that in internet cafés, but I happened to be there to play it too. So I silently sat down at the machine next to his and started my own game.

When he saw I was playing too, after my first match he asked if I wanted to play a one-on-one. Haha, I happily agreed. I'd only just started StarCraft, and I only knew the standard build.

He said: "You get your Void Rays out really fast."

So he'd watched me play just one game and already knew my fast Void Ray build. When we played, I did the same thing. I played Protoss and he played Terran, and I showed off my Void Ray skills again. So he wouldn't know where my Void Rays were gathering, I even hid my fleet.

I thought I had it in the bag. I never expected my fleet would get scouted. He hit it with a long-range missile and wiped out half of it, and I lost any chance of winning.

After the game he told me: "You do get your Void Rays out fast. But right now, you only know that one play. You don't have a full sense of strategy in your head. Once someone sees through your play, you have no strategic reserve and you'll lose."

I still remember that to this day. Real-time strategy isn't just a game. It can train your thinking too.

Roguelikes are a genre I was deeply hooked on for a while. The game that got me in was Vampire Survivors, one of the all-time classics of the genre.

There are many kinds of roguelikes: card-based ones, stage-clearing ones. But the thrill of nearly all of them centers on "mowing down the grass": after a long stretch of patience and building up, you burst out with overwhelming power and cut down wave after wave of enemies.

In this genre, the ones I find best are Hades, Slay the Spire, and Balatro.

But these games, along with city builders and simulation games, share one thing: they take too much time. You basically sit in front of the computer for hours.

City builders are another type I can't put down. Like some people love farming novels, these games let you start from a completely unremarkable beginning and gradually grow your own city, business, empire, and so on.

The most representative is the Cities: Skylines series, where you plan your city from a single road on a map. It's the game I've logged the most hours in, though my population has never once passed 100,000.

Later I played the second one. The graphics are much better, and so is the feel of drawing the grid. Overall I think it's more fun than the first. But the first one has had years of development and has plenty of excellent mods, while the second doesn't have as many.

Beyond that, there are games like Manor Lords and Anno 1800.

As for whether I love games, I get completely immersed when I play these, sometimes for a whole day. But that's exactly where the problem is.

Life is limited, and the time we get to choose freely is even more limited. So what you choose to do with that limited time matters a lot.

If I spent most of my time gaming, what would happen to everything else I want to do?

It's not that I don't want to play. It's that among all the things I want to do, I can't have it all. Time is limited, so I have to tell what's primary from what's secondary, let go of what should be let go, and take seriously what should be taken seriously.

Yesterday, while browsing Xiaoheihe, I saw that a new version of Stronghold Crusader had been released. I was thrilled, because the game hadn't gotten a remaster in many years.

Today I downloaded Tencent MyApp on my Mac, which can run Windows games on a Mac.

I tried it. It lagged too much, so I decided to give up.

Even if I bought it, I'd probably give up after a few hours of play.