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I can’t bring myself to say goodbye, even though I know it’s over. I could play again but that wouldn’t be the same experience at all. The install is no longer just the mountain of bytes that comprise code and visuals and sound but personal investment.
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Indie interregnum? Heard of five of them, have two of them, played one of them. D:
My monuments tend to disappear for good every five years or so when I upgrade my PC and do a clean install of Windows. It’s been a long time since I had to remove one just for hard drive space, thanks to multi-terabyte spinning disks (and I can still remember when a 40 megabyte disk was enormous, and 100 megabytes impossibly huge! I feel old). I’m probably not recording as much video as you though!
Andy,
I didn’t count how many I’d heard of – it was a lot – but I’ve definitely played 11 out of zara’s list. I agree that the monuments tend to get demolished when you go through an OS install. I keep all my video on separate HDs (related to the Worst Moment of 2018 when I thought I’d lost all my video footage for A Field of Flowers) but I’m down to less than 10 GB right now on my C: drive because of all the games I’ve installed but not played out. I’m looking to shift some of the heavyweights – Deadly Premonition is eating up tons of space!
ANDY I REMEMBER WHEN A 1.79 MhZ CPU FELT CUTTING EDGE
Although those were the days before knowledge of clock speed was a big thing. Back then, it was just “this one is faster”.
I love those categories because they’re so real! So next time you come up you’re going to be hot stuff at Witchball eh?
Absolutely get the whole monument thing. I probably have it even worse because I know I almost never replay games, so if I uninstall it, that’s probably goodbye forever.
So yeah, I still have both Grow Up and Grow Home installed because surely I want to hang glide in those places one more time? And make one more circuit of the flying islands in Aer. And I’m too ashamed to admit how many–I typed megabytes when I really meant gigabytes, yikes–of MMOs I have on my hard drive because I really might want to see those worlds at least one more time…
(It’s 60GB. I thought it might be 100…)
Sorry, that comment was to Joel from me.
In other news, there’s a whole bunch of exploration games, movement games, and mystalikes on sale this week. Anyone have recommendations among these?
Aporia: Beyond the Valley
Beyond Eyes
Bokida
The Wild Eternal
Shape of the World
The First Tree
Phoning Home
Future Unfolding
Downward
Flower
Inner Space
Gregg
Don’t expect too much, my children are pushovers when it comes to Witchball 🙂
Urthman
Just realised my most recent monument is Pipe Push Paradise, I don’t feel like I can uninstall it from the phone yet! Oh that’s really interesting to cite MMOs as monuments, considering they don’t have an “end” so to speak, they don’t get finished.
I’ve only played Bokida and Future Unfolding out of your list. I played Bokida in prototype and I found the controls awkward and easy to screw up with (I was looking for exploring games for children at the time) but it’s possible they’ve made many improvements since. Future Unfolding is alright, but it died in stasis; it’s interesting but I didn’t find it quite compelling.
Ah – I did also try Beyond Eyes before release at Rezzed and I found it curious but not compelling. Again, this isn’t a deep appraisal of the game.
Future Unfolding is alright, but it died in stasis
See, your taxonomy is useful. “I put it aside but didn’t immediately uninstall it,” is a pretty good micro-review.
(For me an MMO is “finished” when I get to the part where I’ve seen most of the open world and can’t do much more without having to start interacting with other players.)