Press "Enter" to skip to content

The best games I can’t play yet

As a Stevens student, there’s hardly any time to play the games that I would want to play. It’s a struggle we’re all familiar with: avoiding buying a new game because we know we’ll get way too absorbed in it and that it’ll pull us away from our work. I’ve been guilty of occasionally going on one to two week long Minecraft binges over the course of the pandemic. Unfortunately, now that classes are in-person again, there can’t be any more alt-tabbing between lecture and City Skylines. This makes gaming time much shorter and more precious than before; so, in order to help decide what games to use this limited time on, I’ve assembled a list of the best games that we won’t be able to play until break rolls around.

Peggle is a game series developed by PopCap and has seen releases during the past two decades. The gameplay involves shooting a ball at bricks and letting it bounce down through the course, a hybrid between Atari’s Breakout and Pachinko machines. The games in this series are typically very casual and slow-paced, with the notable exception of Peggle Extreme, which features identical gameplay but more action-focused variants of the standard levels. In general, each level only takes about five to ten minutes to complete, and the hardware requirements are relatively minimal, which means that it’s perfect for commuters looking for a way to procrastinate with an hour between classes.

The PopCap Studios game, Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, was a favorite of mine when I was younger, and after playing it again recently, the game has withstood the test of time. With its objective being to defeat monsters by combining letters to form the longest words possible, the game is reminiscent of other letter-based games such as Scrabble and Wordle. Whenever a word is made, those letters are consumed and replaced with new, random letters, which means letters like ‘z’ and ‘q’ will never get used up but just continue to take up valuable space that could’ve been used by better letters, like ‘b.’ This game is great for the Stevens student that gets back from 7 straight hours of class and decides that they want to keep solving problems.

Both of these game series were released a long time ago, so next we’ll take a look at more modern games. In Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you play as the Dragonborn, a unique individual with the ability to use dragon shouts for combat or utility. Upon its release, it was quickly deemed one of the best open-world roleplaying games of its time, which has resulted in its several re-releases, even including one on Amazon Alexa in 2018. The medieval fantasy setting is similar to that of Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), which makes it perfect for the Stevens student who has been trying to arrange D&D sessions but can’t find a good time for everyone to meet for 6 hours straight.

Whatever your game is, it’s important to cherish the time you have playing it. I’ll never forget the time I’ve spent playing my childhood games, and I’ll always enjoy revisiting them. And, hopefully soon, we’ll have the time to play some brand new games; there’s always a new release to be excited about, whether it’s God of War: Ragnarok or Pokemon Legends: Arceus.

Senioritis is an Opinion column written by one or two Stevens student(s) in their last year of study to discuss life experiences during their final year at Stevens, and other related subject matter.  

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply