As a kid, I grew up reading video game magazines, primarily the legendary Spanish publications Hobby Consolas and Playmania. It was a tradition to stop by the newsstand on my way to school and ask the owner if they had already received the latest Hobby Consolas or Playmania, as well as the official NBA magazine. I spent hours reading the reports and the news sections. However, the section I enjoyed the most by far was the game analysis. An article explaining the gameplay and evaluating a title based on pre-established criteria, resulting in a final score, was enough for me to decide whether a game was worth playing. This was actually more important to me than playing the games themselves since new releases were largely inaccessible to me (except on specific dates like Christmas). So, reading the analysis was the closest thing to playing a game in the pre-YouTube era, before the days of walkthrough videos and gameplay streams.
I was staring at the menu screen of Overwatch 2 last night for about ten minutes without even queuing up. Just staring. The music played, trying to evoke that 2016 nostalgia. I’m not a pro player who endured every painful meta, nor was I here during all the years of drought. I’m the guy who loved Overwatch 1, lived the magic of the “golden age,” drifted away when life happened, and decided to come back now to see what was left. And the feeling? It’s like walking into your childhood home only to find it’s been demolished to become a generic casino. Overwatch 2, today, isn’t a sequel for those who loved the original. It’s a confused apology that no one really accepted.
About 10 years ago, I was deeply addicted to games from Paradox Interactive, a Swedish developer and publisher specializing in 4X games. For those who don’t know, 4X is an acronym for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. These are complex games where you lead a nation or race in a struggle for dominance, whether on a global or galactic scale. Civilization is a well-known example of this genre.
I had just started engineering school, and besides my insane addiction to Diablo 3 (which I’ll talk about someday), I loved Paradox games. It was normal for me to get home after university, usually between 11 PM and midnight, and play an hour or two of Crusader Kings 2 or Victoria 2. That style of play, constantly driven by the phrase “I’ll just do one more thing and then I’ll stop” (Civ players know the feeling), often compromised my sanity the next day due to a lack of sleep.
If you have read my previous posts about building a Home Server via CLI, you know exactly how I feel about Microsoft’s operating system. To me, using Windows for work or development is a waste of performance, privacy, and sanity. It consumes RAM just to exist, sends telemetry data about your mouse movements to Redmond, and restarts without your permission to install an update that changes the icon of the calculator.
