So Yesterday I gamed for a full 24 hours.
And this is why I half-expected it and am not entirely disappointed that I didn't blog yesterday. I really wanted to but I missed a day and that's A-OK with me.
You see I was playing game with Jon for 24 hours for the Extra Life fundraiser in support of the Stollery Children's Hospital. I've wanted to try this fundraiser for several years now but this was the year I finally participated. We played mainly multiplayer games that offered local coop, but it varied. I raised $130, and so next year if/when I do this again, I will hope to raise more. Of course given the low value of the Canadian dollar, I'm not entirely surprised. Jon did better at the fundraising, which makes sense as it was on his twitch channel that we were livestreaming our gaming adventures. You can watch some of our gameplay action later on on his youtube channel. We gamed together for pretty much the whole time with the exception of a couple hours when he went to join the Bioware stream and I played Civ 5 on my own, when I played Poker Night at the Inventory on my own while he prepared some food, when he played DOTA 2 on his own, and when I was far too motion sick to continue playing Contagion with our group (when I played Ticket to Ride on my iPad instead).
What did we play during our 24 hours of gaming fun? Well, I'm not sure that I can remember all the games we played, but I can certainly try! We started with Yoshi's Woolly World on the WiiU. I rather like that game and although I'm not always amazingly good at the controls (this is a theme that runs through much of my WiiU gameplaying, but that is fine by me: I don't game as often as I would like for the most part. We were taking game requests from our donors, and since one donor requested we play Undertale we recorded our third episode in our playthrough of that game (parts 1 and 2 are already on Jon's YouTube channel. If you want to watch those or other of his or our playthroughs they will be found here). Then we played The YAHWG which was a good game, I rather enjoyed it and wonder at what other story progressions we could have gotten (we played it through a couple of times). Then we played Dr. Luigi on the WiiU. Dr. Luigi is a game much like Dr. Mario from my youth, but it came out last year to celebrate Luigi. After that, Jon led us through some of Space Channel 5: Part 2 (I mostly watched but we both payed attention to the happenings on screen). While Jon cooked, I played Poker Night at the Inventory (I won! — I certainly don't always win). And then we played some Castle Crashers, which is a rather fun cute game!
This was followed by my playing 3 hours of Sid Meier's Civilization V (I started one game, quit and then started another, which I enjoyed much more) while Jon was at the Bioware N7 Day stream. Then we played Contagion complete with separate computers and monitors and headsets with a few of his friends (and some strangers). I wasn't very good at that game: most of the time I don't play FPS, so I didn't remember to fix the game settings quite the right way to avoid much of the motion sickness that I sometimes feel while playing that style of game — I was very nauseated and had to stop for a while. I kind of felt like I was letting my team down at the time, but they seemed pretty understanding — I wasn't necessarily very good at the game anyway though I did kill several zombies and was enjoying the gameplay elements.
Next we played Magicka with a couple more of Jon's friends. This was kind of buggy at first but it got better (and more fun!) as we went along! I rather enjoyed the 3+ hours we played of it. Following these group games, it was getting late, so Jon suggested we play a 'scary' game of Fatal Frame on WiiU — we didn't even make it through the demo, but it was an interesting game, for sure. Worms Revolution was next and I don't think I've gotten much better at the Worms games since Armageddon came out (though they're a lot of fun!!). Our next game was a complete co-op play through of Never Alone, which was not only gorgeous but pretty awesome game based on an Inuit story. I highly recommend it even though it did have some more difficult challenges on occasion.
By this point we were getting rather tired. Jon played some DOTA 2 while I made tea and asked him questions about his game (his team won, but it was a bit of an odd game as the players you find available for that game at that hour are pretty limited, I would imagine). We both played some Wizorb next, and then we started the game Jazzpunk, but it was simply not something either of us were in the right mindset for: indeed we struggled a lot to find appropriate game choices for the late night/early morning games: we were simply too tired to play most of them well.
This meant that we played two rounds of You Don't Know Jack from the Jackbox Party Pack 2015 (we were both less than awesome due to it being so late), a most excellent few games of Mount Your Friends (which is ridiculous and just about perfect for that hour of night!), a little bit of Castle Storm (but neither of us really enjoyed the gameplay for the type of multiplayer available), and an attempt at King of Dragon Pass (too intellectually difficult at that hour), before settling on some Mario Maker, Yoshi's Woolly World (we took a full half an hour to pass a level poorly and that's sheer tiredness talking), and a bit of Mario Kart 8.
It was at that point, at 8am that we made it to essentially the 24 hour mark and were super super tired and ready to crash. I'm sure I'll go to sleep early tonight (seeing as a nap doesn't really cut it to recover from that many video games over 24 hours), but it was a great time overall. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to try so many games and simply enjoy the challenge of Extra Life.