Monthly Recap – July 2018

If you’re just joining us, I use the free version of a program called ManicTime to track all the games I play every month. I’ve found it to be a lot more accurate than Steam, especially for the games that I don’t run through Steam. I’m not sure I can really explain why I track this information, though. I guess so I have a record of what I’m playing, in case I ever want to look back and see.

July: The month of the crippled hands. They’ve gotten worse and better, then worse and better again over the course of July. If nothing else, the experience has allowed me to find some games to play if you’re trying to avoid using your left hand. There aren’t very many, unfortunately.

• Neverwinter Nights 2, 9 hours. A game playable with the right hand only, and almost the only game I launched after mid-July. I got to Neverwinter City in the story, then I uninstalled it. I think it’s the second time I’ve done that. I just couldn’t get into the story or the characters.
• Telltale’s The Walking Dead, A New Frontier, 8 hours. I played this early in the month, before my hands got really bad. The Walking Dead is a great game/story (better than the television show sometimes), and also good if you’re trying to rest your left hand, as WASD movement is rare, and you can reach over to the keyboard to do the dumb quicktime events with your right hand.
• Dark Souls III, 4 hours. Around mid-July I thought my left hand was in good-enough shape to handle a little bit of light WASD gaming so I tried DS3 one weekend at about 10% of the speed I normally play it. It was a tremendous mistake and it was the last time I could use my left hand for gaming or much of anything really hehe. (I still need to build a new character in DS3 so I can finish my The Ringed City DLC Blind Playthrough someday.)
• World of Warcraft, 2 hours. Another game that you can play entirely right-handed on the mouse. Mainly I played it to see if anything happened around Teldrassil in the free version of WoW. (Nothing did.)
• BioShock Remastered, 1 hour. I finished up the game early in the month before my hands got really bad, in two 20-minute sessions.
• Guild Wars 2, 1 hour. This was my ill-fated attempt to play the latest Living World episode, which I have yet to return to.