Things To Do On Vacation: Steam Games

Week Three: Things To Do On Someone Else's WiFi

Got a Steam account? Lots of stuff on Steam. I'm primarily a console gamer; some of my few not-horrible memories of dysfunctional family Christmases were of the week between Christmas and NYD, when my father would take his allotted vacation time and we would all sit around the TV, live off of Chinese takeout and pizza, and save the world in some giant time-sucking JRPG.

Nintendo is famously grabby-hands about its IP, so as near as I can tell there are no Zelda games on Steam. Square-Enix, on the other hand, is a lot less so. Squenix, as it's affectionately known these days, is the unholy alliance of Squaresoft, publishers of Final Fantasy, and Enix, publishers of Dragon Quest. These games were so big in Japan that the two companies used to have a gentlemen's agreement not to release their main series games A) on the same day, so as not to poach each other's sales, or B) during the school week, because the whole goddamn country would grind to a halt.

The last console I personally bought was a Playstation2, so I can't testify to the fun quotient of the later games. I've heard bad things about FF11, good things about FF13, and a whole suspicious lot of nothing about FF12. The classics, however, are largely on Steam.

  • Final Fantasy VII was the first on the original Playstation and has a certain blocky nostalgia value;
  • Final Fantasy VIII... uh, exists? and is not completely unplayable, although you will probably want to punch the protagonist and his love interest both right in the mouth; 
  • Final Fantasy IX was a charming throwback to the castles-and-magic kind of fantasy rather than the steampunk directly the more recent games have taken;
  • DragonQuest XI has also gotten a Steam conversion, although sadly none of the previous games seem to be on offer;
  • Undertale is a critically acclaimed indie RPG with a weirdly postmodern tone and Earthbound-ish sense of humor
If you just like blowing your friends up, you can always try Super Bomberman R. (Konami has done a number of good PC conversions over the years, although sadly most are not on Steam. Metal Gear Solid was 'innovative' then 'meta' and has now passed onto 'actively stupid', since they fired the primary madman in charge of the thing. They have also been progressively screwing over Silent Hill. Castlevania remains decent, for now.) Or for some good old-fashioned 8-bit style platformer action, Shovel Knight comes highly recommended.

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