Tomorrow is Sunday, a day of worship and repentance for many. A day to tell the Lord what you did wrong during the week, ask for forgiveness and say a few prayers before returning home to have a large lunch and a good nap. For some, there’s no better start to the week than a Sunday with a clear conscience.
For others, there will be no Hail Marys or Our Fathers, well, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, there will be exclamations. These will go along the lines of “Dear God in heaven!” and “Holy Mother of God make it stop!” and there may even be a “fecking hell!” thrown in for good measure.
Laments such as these come from the lot that got completely sloshed on St. Paddy’s Day Eve and turned their Sunday into an entirely different ecumenical matter by hovering over the gaping maw of a porcelain throne to expunge the evil from their stomachs.
Hopefully, this year, I won’t be part of that particular club. While I do plan to join some friends at McCarthy’s Pub this evening to celebrate what little amount of Byrne blood I have left after five generations of dilution, I don’t wish to spend my Sunday downing horse aspirin and Pepto.
Sure I’ll have a few! Maybe more. I won’t be ordering myself a pint of black stuff either. Nope. I can’t stomach the stuff. I was born a cider fiend and will die a cider fiend. I didn’t earn the nickname Cider Cat for nothing, I’ll say that much. However, despite my current bravado, as the night wears on, I predict my resolve will falter. There will be many, many clinks of the glass followed by utterances of sláinte, leading to more pints than planned being tossed. My pals and I will start singing Luke Kelly’s rendition of Dirty Old Town at the top of our lungs despite the “No Singing” signs at the pub, and after a few very loud Father Jack Hackett impressions, we’ll get told to leave the place.
It seems St. Paddy’s Day is a loophole for convincing myself it’s healthy to consume shamrock-shaped brownies with green icing the size of dinner plates and empty the pub’s last cask of Bulmers before switching to bottled Angry Orchard. I am sure that by the end of the night, I will be able to hold a conversation entirely in leprechaun limericks that involve questionable life choices and my liver will be requesting political asylum in Switzerland.
I can hear my great-grandmother Mary Alice now saying: “Look at the state o’ you!”, before shaking her head and muttering “eejit” as she walks off. And she wouldn’t be wrong.
But, not everyone here at the site will get silly over the weekend. They are the smart ones by staying indoors and playing games. One of us is even flying to the States for a bit of gaming on the West Coast.
Here’s what’s going on gaming-wise this weekend:
Connor Makar, Staff Writer – Will be on a plane
This weekend I’m flying to GDC! I’ll be chatting to devs and trying some games out, coverage for all of which you can expect in the coming weeks (if the Boeing I’m flying in doesn’t lose a wing killing me and 150 members of the UK games industry).
As such I will be playing no video games for fun. It’s full business mode. The beard is getting trimmed, the hair is getting brushed, and I’ve bought new running shoes for dashing between talks and new jeans that fit.
Jim Trinca, Video Producer – Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator
I love driving. There’s something deeply, soulfully kinetic about being wrapped in a tonne of steel that is an extension of you. A docking station for your arse that makes it go fast, via the magic of an exploding liquid made from corpses. That’s proper magic, that is. So why are we in this hobby so preoccupied with pretending to be wizards or spacemen? There would be plenty of awe to be found, surely, in the mundanity of cutting about town in a crappy little hatchback, doing little jobs, carving out a little slice of life in a surprisingly authentic recreation of… say… downtown Barcelona?
Luckily, someone has enabled just that sort of fantasy in the form of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, which I’m having a lot of fun with from a digital tourism angle if nothing else. It’s more than a little janky and the driving model with a controller feels minging, so a wheel is extremely recommended – I’ll be digging out my trusty Thrustmaster as a result – but it’s fairly peerless as a city-based driving simulator that is about the type of driving most of us actually do, as opposed to transporting wooden pallets from a commercial estate in Manchester to an identical commercial estate in Leipzig.
Aside from that, I’ll be playing that big RPG you’re looking forward to which I can’t talk about. No, the other one.
Rebecca Jones, Guides Writer – Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
In a time-sensitive break from the usual 9-5, my partner’s working for most of this weekend; and while I’d love to say I’m going to throw myself into spring cleaning the house in an act of solidarity, what I’m probably going to do is try my best to no-life the rest of Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls.
Beating this slightly janky third-person shooter tie-in to one of my favourite visual novel series has been my on-again-off-again project for six months now. It’s not that I don’t like this game or that I’m struggling with it; the problem lies with the fact that you can only save at fixed locations, which aren’t marked on the map and which crop up anything from five minutes to an hour and a half apart. This means, quite simply, I only get the opportunity to play at most once or twice a week, since even though it’s great on Steam Deck it’s not exactly a game you can just pick up when you find yourself with 20 minutes to kill — it’s a real “clear your evening” kind of deal. Or “clear your weekend”, in this case.
That’s us. Are you staying in this weekend? If so, what are you playing? If you decide to go out on the town to celebrate the holiday: Éirinn go Brách and may your hangover be mild.