I’ve tried following trackers: Game Tracker, Sequel, Gamery, and Winston. I have compared the apps by price, how native they feel. All of these apps are available on the Mac via Catalyst or natively.

Game Tracker was the first app I tried. It features native Mac app. I didn’t like Game Tracker design, especially when searching for a game. In terms of look and feel, I like Sequel the most. Sequel also allows you to track TV shows and it has wonderful animations when you make an episode as complete. But I found the $100 one-time unlock price a bit too much, and instead stayed with Gamery, which costs $15. Unlike any other services, it has some extra features: a scanner, and integration with Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. The only feature which I wish I had is data export and more metadata for adjusting completion date and start date.

In the past, I kept a Markdown file with games I am playing, as well as a wish-list. But using a dedicated app is a bit more fun and motivated me to log 183 games so far across 15 platforms. Nintendo Switch is the indisputable leader with the number of games I own. I like to complete games I play, and this is an extra motivation for me to keep the number of games I am playing simultaneously to a minimum. It spreads my attention, and switching between games forces me to retrain muscle memory.

I am looking forward to playing this game, and if you missed it, I would recommend it, for people who like old Lukas Arts quests: Full Throttle and others. I have great memories of completing the remastered version of Monkey Island 2 on my original iPad. When I wanted to start playing and deep dive into the world of pirates and silly adventures I was presented with the choice.

There’s one aspect of modern gaming which doesn’t sit right with me—it’s difficult choices. I mean I don’t like to choose difficulty in general, because I always self-doubt my choice. It’s my personality I guess. And video games is an escape. A world where I can’t make the wrong choice. Unless making wrong choices is part of the game.¹

This screen is terrible because there’s not even a medium option. I see this design as a delegation of UX to the player. Now in a way, you designed two games, and you want me to be responsible for making a choice which one I want. The problem is, and a truth, at least for me. I do not know. Honestly, I do not know what’s best for me here. I just want to play the game, enjoy a story, and be challenged with puzzles. If you are a game designer, I want you to take more responsibility and reduce these choices for your customers, or at least hide, or bury them in the settings— default experience matters. Your choices matter. If the game feels too hard or not too challenging enough at least I can blame you, and not blame myself for picking a wrong option. From my experience, in most of the cases, no matter what difficulty I pick, I end up restarting the game. Or constantly switching between options during gameplay, which is even worse. It takes me out of flow, now I am thinking as a game designer instead of enjoying the process.

I remember picking up a DVD copy of World of Warcraft. They had me on “Macintosh” written on the side.

Recently I picked up a Diablo IV copy. Me and my partner finished Diablo III in couch co-op on the Switch. I wanted to experience what Blizzard has to offer running on a powerful PS5. I have also purchased a second PS5 controller just for this occasion. I am glad to report that we are pleased with the game so far, and I recommend it. It is even more fun than the previous version, much darker and mature. The game is approachable with a low learning curve. The user interface is beautifully crafted and gameplay works great with a controller. But there are issues, and I have concerns, deep concerns about everything which surrounds the core game. Compared with the Switch version, one can say that the human experience setting up the game went into actual hell. The actual demons I needed to fight were 2FA error messages and constant loading spinners.

I was wise to put the disk in early so it could be copied to our PS5 while we were putting the kids to sleep. The process of copying of course has not finished because PS5 fell asleep, and I had to restart it. We watched a TV show listening to PS5’s rocket-ship-about-to-take-off noise.

Good start. I opened the game and the first thing it asked me was to log into Battle.net. I do have an account, of course. The devs made it convenient allowing me to scan QR code using my iPhone’s camera. Then I was presented with a login screen and signing-in issue as the 2FA code from Blizzard’s proprietary iOS app didn’t work. I could sign in. Soon I learned that their property app is retired and instead, functionality is shown in Blizzard’s Battler.net. Me 20 minutes trying to figure out how to migrate didn’t work, and I realised that I couldn’t do it without submitting a ticket. I sent my ticket on the 28th of October and received a reply the next day. With apologies for the slow reply, I was asked to answer 12 vague security questions. I think 1 day is pretty fast, okay. I replied on the 31st of October, it took me 20 minutes to collect all the information I could find. I was able to ask some of them, including my previous address (I don’t know which, I have 7 of them), PayPal transaction ID from my bank, security question (thanks 1Password), and my previous phone number. It’s been 10 business days, I still have not received any reply. Okay, I don’t care about the account, I would like to get it back eventually, but we really wanted to play, so we just created a new account.

On that cold night, I logged in with my wife’s account just to test it out. Sony linked my wife’s account with my PSN, and now I would have to wait a year to unlink them, okay? I created a new account for my partner on Battle.net. Then I realised that my wife also needed a PSN account just to be able to play locally, so we created a new account for her as well. By the time the game was loaded and we both “logged in”, it was almost 2 AM, we played for 10 minutes and then went to bed. Next week we played again, I am not going to do any work on the setup until we finish the main campaign. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

What can be improved

1. Sony, please adopt Nintendo’s “PLAY MODE” physical box design for demonstrating how your game can be played right on the box, so we don’t have to do research just to know how the game can be played.
2. Blizzard (now Microsoft), however, is responsible for not using open standards for 2FA, why they are still in charge, and why this kind of decision was made. It costs in customer support and development, it’s idiotic tech leadership.
3. Sony, please learn from Nintendo how to do couch co-op. There was zero setup on Nintendo Switch, it just worked. Why Sony and Blizzard (now acquired by Microsoft) think it is okay to steal ~2 hours of our lives just so 2 of us can start the game is beyond me.

Image credits LeHeathersBoutique, sourced from Etsy.