Look, this feature is good for my soul, figuring out what works and doesn’t on my less-than-stellar laptop and deleting them without a second glance if they’re borked, but boy does it make me sad. Why? Well, I like playing games, and having games that don’t work and can’t be played is a big ol’ bummer. Mainly because of that first declaration. But also because some might have been acquired with money, and I work hard correcting bad grammar for those dollars so…boo to that. The majority of games in my collection are there because I wanted to play them, and hitting a brick wall right away with a genuine curious smile on your face is not ideal.
Either way, here we are with the second edition of My Laptop Hates These Games. Read on to see which ones in particular.
Small Radios Big Televisions
This is the previously mentioned big ol’ bummer of the month. I got a copy of Small Radios Big Televisions from some recent bundle whose name I know not, and it seemed like a cool, extremely chill adventure exploring the inner workings of deserted factories in search of data cassettes that contain boundless virtual worlds. Y’know, the usual thing. Regardless, I’ll never get to collect those cassette tapes because the game crashes as soon as I launch it, and I’m not alone, with the answer being updating drivers for my graphics card. Which I don’t know how to do or if there even are drivers available. So that’s that, uninstalled. Maybe it’ll come to Xbox One…one day.
Astral Heroes
Some days, I like thinking about all the card games or card-based games I could be playing right now and imagining a world where I both had the time and team to eat every single one up with glee, learning mechanic after mechanic and eye-balling amazing artwork until my eyes were no more. Alas, nope, not ever going to happen, and that stinks because of forthcoming creations like Munchkin Collectible Card Game and Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game. Well, looks like I won’t ever being playing Astral Heroes either, a sequel to Astral Masters and a free, fantasy-based card game with deck building, similar to Hearthstone. All I see when I run the executable is a black screen, but I can move a cursor around and hear music.
Once Upon a Time
Once Upon A Time, according to its description on Steam, is an adventure game in which a young woman finds a magic book and is instantly teleported inside. It is not, as far as I can tell, a tie-in with ABC’s Once Upon A Time, which is a popular TV series about a new world, one in which fairy-tale legends and modern life collide. For this free game, each chapter of the book is one single tale in which you will have to solve riddles in a fairy-tale setting. Magic and nature will be friends and foes. Um, sure. That sounds fine if somewhat vague, but even on “very low” settings this was nothing but chunks of various shades of gray that made it next to impossible to navigate. It was like I was swimming in a cave full of fog when the reality is I was supposed to be in some building collecting scrolls.
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My Laptop Hates These Games takes a quick look at the titles that kind of, only sort of run or don’t run at all on my ASUS laptop. Here’s hoping that some of these, specifically the ones that looked interesting, come to console down the road. Y’know, those gaming machines where nothing ever goes wrong and every game runs perfectly without ever crashing or freezing or glitching out. Maybe I’ll play these there or in 2056 when I get a new laptop that is, even at that point, still somewhat obsolete.
Grinding Down 