Depression stuff / Freespace 1 vs Freespace 2

Okay blog.  Maybe I should spend some more time with you these days.  Maybe we'd best just get back to basics.  I think part of why blogging felt so vital to me in the old days of yore was perhaps because it's a good way of bearing witness to your own feelings, thereby helping you detach from all of the ---- you may have been going through at the time.  And yeah, there was a lot of it, at that time.

 

Anyways, it's been an odd couple of days.  I've felt off, for a couple of different reasons, which I won't really go into here, so I took the day off for myself.  Interestingly enough a lot of the problem I've been having recently is "not knowing what to do with myself", as in I'll have some chunk of the day to spend but I wouldn't really know what I "should" be doing with that time.

This feels slightly different than what I was feeling before in previous months, where I "couldn't decide whether I should be working or trying to relax".  I think the solution to =that= one was to just try to schedule a healthy mix (in advance, if possible), but also to detach and realize that the entire problem is sort of a humorous lose-lose proposition in the first place.  It's like yeah, you can "stress out about not relaxing enough", but that's sort of gets to be oxymoronic?

Right now, though I think it's more of an empty feeling.  In my vocabulary I'd actually just call this "depression" as it fits the ticket of "you don't really feel motivated to do things that previously warranted excitement".  Though of course there are different flavors of depression, even in my labeling.

Contrary to some plebeian beliefs, depression is not "cured" by simply "going and having fun".  The whole problem in the first place is that you aren't really getting as much excitement and/or joy out of things, so it doesn't necessarily really help to go and do "fun things".  In some earlier years I would feel this state of mind acutely at social dance events and would always feel irked when people seemed to have the attitude of wanting to pull people into a happy-go-lucky energy.  I mean, they're not in the wrong; some people really do just need that, it's just not what I happened to need at the time.

Physical activity =has= empirically proven to be helpful though (at least for me), so I guess that is probably in my future.  Other than that, there is not actually a ton of different home remedies and solutioning to be done other than simply being kind to myself and trying to practice self-compassion, as well as what I like to call "setting yourself up for success".  By that I usually mean taking steps to make sure you are creating an environment in which you are more likely to succeed...which could be as simple as "avoid things that bring negativity".

 

Moving onto other news...I've finished playing through all of the Freespace 2 campaign.  This is my first time seeing most of it, actually, as I think I probably only remember the first few missions back when I first encountered Freespace/Freespace 2 way back in the day.  Overall Freespace 2 is sort of a mixed bag when it's compared to Freespace 1.  It's hard to say whether it's a stronger package overall or not.

On the one hand, Freespace 2 does feel slightly more refined in terms of ship combat.  All the basics are still the same, and the weapon loadout is actually not =too= different, but at least we don't have the problem of the Avenger being the best gun AND unlocked super early.  There's a lot more (reasonable) tradeoffs to be had among the best set of primary weapons now, which is good.  There's also a more varied ship selection, with one part of the campaign even having you pilot some Vasudan crafts, which is a nice changeup.  Overall the weapons and craft just feel stronger on all sides, which felt nice.  I think it gave you a bit more agency as the player, as with the Kayser guns you can really start mowing down fighters and bombers quickly, and with the Maxim cannon you can help take out larger ships in a more active way without needing to pilot a sluggish bomber.  Overall I got the feeling that less of the Freespace 2 missions were "annoying", though there were still some of course.

There are some "secret special ops" missions which have you going undercover as a sort of double-agent infiltrating an enemy organization, which were an excellent change of pace.  But yeah, overall I think the missions were somehow just more enjoyable to me in Freespace 2.

Where Freespace 2 falls a bit more flat for me is in the story and overall progression of the campaign.  I wonder if part of this is something about the development being rushed towards the end or something (?), as it feels like they set up a lot of narrative threads that never really ended up bearing fruit.  The final mission in particular has you fighting what seems to be an unlimited number of Shivan bombers and fighters as the Terran fleet tries to run away from the Shivan armada.  The idea of fighting a massive onslaught of Shivans is awesome; the problem is that the rest of your entire squad ends up dying after about 5 minutes of dogfighting, meaning the comms channel is devoid of the usual "check your six!" "nice kill!" chatter, and you have to spend the entire second half of the mission without anyone to order around and help you (I think there are some Vasudan fighters helping out, but they aren't part of your squad?), all while command is yelling at you because all of the defenseless transports are getting their butts blown off.  And to cap all that off, the Shivans make the sun go supernova for some unexplained reason, and the closing cutscene basically goes "what were the Shivans doing?  We'll never know.  Are we safe for now?  Only time will tell." which is not really a satisfying resolution.

Freespace 1 in contrast had an excellent sort of progression, where first you were fighting the Vasudans, then having first contact with the Shivans, feeling like you were screwed because of their superior technology, then finally claiming the means to fight back, culminating in an epic showdown where you (literally you) need to fly around in a bomber and take out the big bad Shivan capital ship.  Now, that last mission is not really that FUN to play, but you can't argue that it's an epic tale with a satisfying conclusion.  It really didn't feel that way in Freespace 2, and I know that there are some leftover unused internal set pieces in some of the later levels, so I have to wonder if they simply ran out of time and had to cut things short.

So I guess in a few words, Freespace 2 was a bit more enjoyable, but Freespace 1 was definitely more memorable.

Anyways, I'm checking that one off my list, woohoo!  I've still been playing through Terranigma from time to time, and I'm not sure if I just don't "get" the game but I =really= can't see how this is supposedly the superior game when compared to Illusion of Gaia.

I played a few Space Alert missions too...that was fun.  I finally got around to transferring all of my mission log data to excel spreadsheets with nice formulas and everything, so I'm looking forward to perhaps getting back into that a little more.

 

There's other stuff to write about too, but I'll call it there for now.  Perhaps I'll be back for more sooner rather than later.