Not to be too melodramatic here, but I’ve been feeling bummed out about games lately, and I came pretty close to shutting this blog down.
To be more specific: I felt disconnected from a hobby that I’ve been passionate about for almost 30 years. I felt like I wasn’t able to connect with games anymore, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d gotten older and harder to reach, or that the games themselves simply didn’t care about trying to reach me. I felt increasingly at odds with the community at large, what with hostile comment threads and Twitter bullying, horrendous attitudes on sexism, sexuality, race and equality. I’d begun to feel alienated from one of the only things that really made me feel like I belonged anywhere.
And then, all of a sudden: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes out and hits me square in the solar plexus.
And now, earlier this week: sterling reviews for the latest DLC for Dishonored (which prompted me to go finish The Knife of Dunwall),Saints Row IV, and possibly one of the most anticipated indie games of the year: Gone Home, which I’m in the process of purchasing right this very minute. Not to mention Plants v Zombies 2, which I’ve been doodling around with on my iPhone. And also Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, which I’ve played about an hour or so and which so far is a very good-looking Mario & Luigi RPG, which suits me just fine.
Oh, and then this GTAV trailer, which is fucking insane:
Maybe it was just the summer doldrums bringing me down. But I’m back, baby!
EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot to mention Papers, Please and the inexplicably well-reviewed new Splinter Cell. Sweet mercy, it’s been a pretty amazing month.
I said last week that it’s been at least 2 months since I turned on my 360. As it happens, I had a brief window this past Sunday afternoon, and so I decided to download and try the demo for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which had been getting some amazing reviews and overwhelmingly positive Twitter activity. I figured I’d give it a quick shot, see if it was worth my time, then wait for the Steam release in a few weeks.
Instead, I finished the demo and then immediately purchased the game, and then spent the next 3 hours finishing it. And it’s all I’ve been thinking about ever since.
I’ve been going through a weird quasi-depressive phase over the last few weeks – there’ll be a longer blog post about that later this week, hopefully – and part of the effect of this depression is that I’ve been unable to enjoy anything. I’ll spend hours in front of my computer, looking at the 60+ games in my “Installed” library on Steam, and end up going back to Farm Heroes Saga (which is related to Candy Crush Saga and which is also getting a longer blog post in and of itself later this week) because I can’t seem to allow myself sink in to anything.
This is partly why Brothers feels like a godsend. Because I was hooked immediately. There was nothing to think about, nothing to get in my brain’s way; I found myself under the game’s spell as soon as the title screen blended into the game’s first moments.
The game is short – only 3-4 hours at most – but nearly every second of that time (and every inch of the game’s world) is beautiful and meaningful and emotionally resonant. The game’s story is simple – two brothers must go on a quest to find a cure for their ailing father. Of course, there’s a bit more to the story, but to say anything further would lessen the game’s impact.
The game’s mechanics are also elegantly simple – each brother gets its own thumbstick, and if a brother needs to interact with something, you pull their corresponding trigger. That’s it. Of course, this does take a bit of getting used to – even by the end of the game, I would occasionally get confused as to who was moving where – but that’s also partly the idea, and it’s a conceptually brilliant design when you think about it. The two brothers must work together to accomplish their goal, and in order to do so you must get your left and right thumbs to work properly, in tandem and harmony with each other.
There are many things to love about this game, but the thing that rang the truest for me is how the game feels so refreshingly free of meta-ironic bullshit and hipster posturing. The game is utterly sincere and genuine in its execution; every frame of animation is carefully crafted to feel right. Indeed, I urge you to have the brothers interact with anything you come across – each brother will act differently, for one thing, and nearly every interaction is unique.
When I’d spoken late last year of my desire to have games move beyond the act of shooting guns and killing things, this is the sort of game I’d hoped would take its place. It’s an incredible experience – indeed, a truly moving experience, too – and it’s one of the finest games I’ve played in a long time.
I might’ve mentioned this already, but I suppose I might as well bring it up again; having a kid has completely changed my gaming habits. Granted, it’s also completely changed nearly every other aspect of my life, too, so the gaming slice of my life pie* was bound to get caught up in the sweeping change that having a kid inevitably brings.
Still, it’s something that I haven’t quite adjusted to yet. I’m finding it harder to get into new games, for one thing; I’m also finding it harder to stay engaged in the games I’m already playing. And in any event, long gone are the days when I could just plug in to a game and stay there for 8 hours; now I’m lucky if I can stay focused for more than 30 minutes.
I think it’s been at least 2 months since I turned on my 360. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true – my kid was a bit restless a few weeks ago so I put in Rayman Origins because I figured it was colorful and musical and would maybe focus his attention for a little bit. Alas – no such luck; he stuck with it for about 5 minutes before deciding he’d had enough.
This is all to say that I’m not necessarily doing a whole lot of gaming these days, and when I do, it’s very much in short bursts; I’ll get up to a checkpoint, save, quit, try something else; get to a checkpoint, save, quit, try something else.
Case in point: Shadowrun Returns. I never played the original, and don’t know anything about its history. Didn’t even follow its Kickstarter, beyond knowing that it had one. I bought it because it seemed like something right up my alley – a cyberpunk/fantasy/sci-fi setting, a turn-based RPG with a battle system straight out of XCOM, lots of well-written text. And for the most part, I’m really enjoying it – except for the lack of a quick-save, which means I can’t experiment, and if I die, I have to replay the previous 20 minutes all over again. And while the text is fun, and the dialogue is sharp and witty, there’s also quite a lot of it, and I find myself scanning it quickly as opposed to taking it in. And the game doesn’t necessarily explain its mechanics all that well – took me 3-4 battles before figuring out how to throw a grenade. So, basically, I’m playing it one room at a time; once I finish an area, the game quicksaves, and then I log out.
I’ve been also sorta dabbling in the PC port of Fez, in a sort-of meaningless loyalty gesture to Phil Fish. When I first played it on the 360, I got very, very deep into the hidden language and went out of my way to scour newsgroup discussions about some of the more obscure puzzles; this time, though, I’m really just out to enjoy the scenery and find some cubes if I see anyway. It’s a very peaceful world to be in, which is a feeling I don’t often experience in games.
What else, what else… oh, I accidentally-on-purpose picked up XCOM on the iPad last week, when it was on “sale”. And you know what? It is perfect on the iPad. Not that it wasn’t highly enjoyable (if a bit stressful) on the PC/console, but having it on the iPad makes idle moments on the go a lot more interesting. The touch controls make perfect sense, and the in-between-mission ant-farm view was basically built to be used on an iPad.
Beyond that, I’m kinda just twiddling my thumbs, waiting for GTAV and trying to figure out how to play it without alienating my wife and child. The next Mario & Luigi RPG comes out on the 3DS next week, which should be fun… Gone Home should be out on Steam next week, too, which I’m very much looking forward to… I’m still skeptical about Saints Row 4, the new Splinter Cell, and that otherXCOM: The Bureau thing… and in the meantime, I still have my Steam Summer Sale to go through.
It’s going to be a weird next few weeks, is all I’ll say. Not at all sure how updated this blog is going to be, though it won’t be for lack of trying.
* I was going to cut this out, but you know what? It’s not often you come across the worst metaphor in the entire history of written communication. So, really, you ought to be thanking me for leaving it in. I very nearly changed the name of this site to better serve its honor.
This is a comment to Polygon’s review of Dragon’s Crown, an RPG that I must admit I’ve only known about because of the controversy surrounding its rather gratuitous art style.
And this comment is pretty much why I tend to feel curmudgeonly these days, and very much like the solipsistic misanthrope I call myself in the site’s subheader. It’s why I can feel myself starting to pull away from games in general. Even though that Polygon thread is, for the most part, remarkably well-spelled for a review thread, and even though there’s lots of thoughtful and well-spoken pushback, it’s still kind of jaw-dropping.
Between the Phil Fish thing, and then these death threats because of a numerical tweak in the statistics of an imaginary gun in Call of Duty, and now this latest example of willful blindness to and spiteful ignorance of rampant sexist attitudes in games development, I can’t help but wonder what the hell I’m doing anymore. And this is all just in the last few days!
Thankfully, the game’s PR people managed to chime in with some goddamned common sense:
Phil Fish finally snapped on Saturday, after an[other] epic argument with an asshole on Twitter. He announced that he was cancelling Fez II and getting out of the games business entirely before rage-quitting his Twitter account.
“im getting out of games because i choose not to put up with this abuse anymore.”
* * *
It can be difficult to separate the art from the artist – sometimes. As an example, I can’t even enjoy Chicken Run anymore, such is my loathing of any and all things related to Mel Gibson; similarly, I can’t read anything by Orson Scott Card without feeling a bit sick; but I’m still as big a fan of Woody Allen now as I was when I was 13 (even if his films aren’t quite as good now as they were then). Indeed, Woody raised this very same question about separating the art from the artist in Bullets Over Broadway, and it was seen at the time as some sort of mea culpa: “An artist creates his own moral universe.”
On Saturday night – a few hours after this all went down – I decided to finally get around to watching Indie Game: The Movie, which had been on my to-do list ever since it came out. I knew that Fish had a reputation for being combative and controversial, and I was curious to see if that was borne out in the film. Sure enough, within 5 minutes of his introduction, you see a whole bunch of hateful internet comments directed squarely at him; and you also see him acting like a bit of an asshole.
The movie didn’t necessarily clear things up for me. On the one hand, Fez is very much a personal artistic statement; it might’ve released earlier and have been a bit more polished with a larger team, but having other input would make the experience feel diluted, somehow. Everything you experience in that game is what Phil specifically wants you to feel; the charming beauty of the pixelated world, the obscure abstraction of encoded language, the freedom of exploration without consequence. The game itself is nothing but charm and whimsy and pure intellectual joy.
On the other hand, Phil himself is restless, intensely passionate, and quick to fly into rages; in dealings with his ex-business partner, he says – multiple times – that he wants to “murder” him; and while I doubt that he would have literally murdered this person, I wouldn’t be surprised if, at that moment, if this ex-business partner happened to walk into the room, he wouldn’t have tried to punch that man repeatedly.
I’ve followed Phil on Twitter for a while, now, and when he was active he was constantly getting into crazy arguments with crazy people, and in doing so he made himself look like a crazy person – regardless of whatever moral high ground he felt that he was standing on.
* * *
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Twitter. Hell, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with social media in general; in fact, just two weekends ago, I publicly declared that I was going on a Facebook hiatus, and that ended up lasting less than 48 hours.
For small independent gaming companies that can’t afford big PR budgets – much like any small artist, be they musician, writer, etc. – Twitter is a necessary device. It’s free public interaction with your audience, and your reach becomes wider as you yourself grow louder. How you get louder, though, is where it gets tricky. Because the bigger you get, the more terrible people you attract, and at some point that shit will get under your skin. Do you hide? Do you answer back? Do you ignore?
keeping a low profile and/or establishing a confusing or impersonal facade has its disadvantages and opportunity costs…
I have a good friend who writes for Gamespot. She’s a great writer, and has an insightful critical mind, and when she writes a review it is clear that she carefully considers every word. But the only thing that matters to the commenters on her articles is that she’s transgender, and they say the most vile, awful things that have absolutely nothing to do with the words she’s written, and they come out in full force without any provocation whatsoever. (They might argue that her mere existence writing for the site is the provocation, to which I say to them: go fuck yourselves.) I don’t know how she puts up with it. These people are foaming at the mouth with rage just because she exists.
I also follow a number of prominent games writers on Twitter, some of whom happen to be female. And they are constantly bombarded with hateful, misogynistic bile and straight-up rape threats for no other reason than that they have opinions about games and that they also have breasts. And if they dare to suggest that there is a serious sexism problem in the games industry – not just from gamers but from the games themselves – well, just follow @femfreq for a little while and see how that goes.
People saying “indie dev X just needs to mellow” have no idea how caustic and horrible the internet is when aimed at a specific person.
What the hell is wrong with us? Why do we allow this sort of shit to continue? Why do trolls get the last laugh, even if nobody’s laughing?
I sincerely hope Phil takes advantage of this internet hiatus and continues to work on Fez 2. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it’s better that he puts his focus squarely on the thing that actually makes the world a better place. Fez made the world a better place for me; he did succeed in that.
I just hope he understands that this isn’t about “winning.” Nobody wins on the internet. That’s the whole point; it doesn’t matter how eloquent you are; you can Oscar Wilde someone to death and some anonymous asshole is always going to come back 30 seconds later and call you a fag, simply because they can. That doesn’t mean you give up; it just means you change the conversation. Make the thing you have to make.
The Steam Sale continues to roll along, and I continue to buy things here and there that I didn’t necessarily mean to.
Here are my spoils, updated as of Friday morning with newest additions in italics:
Rogue Legacy
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Thomas Was Alone
Sword & Sworcery EP
Dirt 3
The Last Remnant
Home
Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe
Bully
Toki Tori 2
Skyrim DLC
Gunpoint
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
As of right now (again, Friday morning), there’s only one thing on my wishlist that I’d like to pick up if it goes on sale: Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which apparently has a Portal-meets-Lovecraft vibe going on, and I’m a sucker for that kind of shit. I’d also love it if that Civ V: Brave New World DLC came down in price, although considering that it just came out like a week ago, I highly doubt it’ll get anything beyond a token 10% discount. (And if I’m being honest, here, the truth is that I’d probably only play it once, on Very Easy, and still fuck everything up and maybe give up halfway through the campaign. Which is, again, why I wouldn’t mind picking it up if it came down in price.)
In the meantime, I continue to plug away at things I’ve already played before – specifically Tomb Raider, which I’m enjoying just as much the 2nd time around (even if the things that were problematic before remain so now).
Also received Shin Megami Tensei IV in the mail yesterday, which has received a rather positive reception even if nobody’s really articulated exactly what it is. But it’s just as well; ever since I gave up on Animal Crossing I’ve been kinda just dicking around in Paper Mario Sticker Star, which is good but not nearly as fun as the Mario & Luigi games, and so any excuse I can find to play with the 3DS is one I’ll gladly take.
No gaming plans this weekend; I will be in a recording studio, making music, for pretty much the whole 48 hours. Fun! I only hope there’s air conditioning over there.
WordPress says this is my 400th post, although that number includes the old posts at the now-defunct blogspot URL and some drafts-in-progress. Still, though, 400 posts! Let’s celebrate this historic milestone by talking about anxiety, depression, and my poor impulse control as it relates to Steam Summer Sales.
You see, every time there’s a Steam sale, I get all excited and tingly – which is ridiculous, because according to the Steam Calculator, I already own everything and I’ve only played less than half of it:
Games owned: 338
Games not played: 166 (49%)
…and so not only do I get excited and tingly for no good reason, but I also, then, find myself getting a little disappointed that there’s nothing new on sale that I haven’t already bought.
Of course, that doesn’t actually stop me. As of Monday afternoon, here’s my current haul (10 games, approximately $40):
Dirt 3
Super Puzzle Platformer Puzzle
The Last Remnant
Home
Rogue Legacy
Sword & Sworcery EP
Thomas Was Alone
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Bully: Scholarship Edition
Toki Tori 2
There’s more stupid irony to come, as you might expect. 3 of the games on that list are games I’ve already played and simply wanted better-looking versions of (Dirt 3, Sword & Sworcery, Bully). I’d heard good things about Home and Thomas Was Alone, and since I keep saying I’m tired of shooters I figured I’d get on board with some quality indie non-shooters. I can’t necessarily explain The Last Remnant, other than that every once in a while I get a JRPG itch, and this was $6 or something. Toki Tori 2… well, for some reason Steam had given me a 10% discount coupon, which on top of the sale discount made it a no-brainer. Blood Dragon was stupid cheap, and I still sorta-like Far Cry 3. But the ultimate point that I’m driving at is that of the 10 games on that list above, Rogue Legacy is the only one that I had a genuine hunger for, and while it was modestly discounted it wasn’t even part of the actual sale.
And yet, here’s the dumbest part of this whole enterprise:
Even though I’ve added 10 new games to my already absurd collection, you know what I ended up playing the most this weekend? Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider, which are games that I’d already beaten quite thoroughly earlier this year.
I don’t know why. I suppose I was curious to see what this Steam Badge thing is all about; I’m still not 100% sure what they are or why I need them, and I’m not about to start annoying my friends list in hopes of completing a set, but after playing for half an hour or so and coming back up for air, I’d see that I’d unlocked a new badge, and so that’s an easy enough carrot to chase.
But I think there’s more to it (i.e., the replaying of finished games) than mere curiosity over Badges. I think that I just wanted to travel over familiar ground.
This happens sometimes, especially when I’m feeling anxious and/or depressed. I suppose I’ve been feeling a bit of both, lately. Truth is, I’m in a bit of a life-rut. I mean, I love my kid, and I love my wife, and those are the most important things and that’s all well and good. But I’ve been super-stressed out about money, my day job, my music career, my flailing attempts at creativity, my kid’s future and my ability to provide for him, and etc. And so there’s been times lately when I sit down in front of my computer and I look at my “Installed Games” folder and I’m overcome with a sort of paralysis – I have too many choices, and none of them are scratching the right itch, and so rather than try something new that might be confusing or “arty” or difficult or non-intuitive, which are normally things that I’m intrigued by, I end up going towards the thing that I already know and am familiar with.
Along those lines, I’ve also been punishing myself by replaying a little bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Playstation Network was offering free copies for PSN users, and so I felt compelled to download it and see how it felt on my TV, and I played for a few minutes… but the PC version just looks and feels better, and there’s also something about playing it in my tiny, cramped office that adds to the tension, so I went back to the PC version. I’d lost my old game save when my hard drive crashed, so I’ve been starting anew, and it’s been an interesting experience getting back into it – I’m not playing nearly as stupidly as I did the first time around, for one thing, though it’s still very tense and I can only play it for 30 minutes or so before the tension overwhelms the fun.
Regarding the rest of the Steam Sale: I’m trying to hold off, though there’s really not much else that I’d be picking up at this point that I don’t already have. I suppose I’d like to see Gunpoint come back – it was up for a community vote and lost, but considering that Dishonored came back after losing a vote, perhaps this one will come back as a featured item. I’d tried the demo and liked it, but I also knew that at a certain point I’d probably get flustered and frustrated with it… so I’d rather pay less if I’m going to get it.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to participate in Critical Distance’s “Blogs of the Round Table” feature, but since this month’s question hits me right where I live, I feel like I’ve gotta jump in:
What is the future of videogame blogging? Has it been usurped by social media and YouTube pundits, or is it still thriving? Is a one-sided conversation one worth having?
On his blog Only a Game, Chris Bateman summarises a recent ‘blog moot’ between several bloggers. Should blogs be about “exploring my own issues in a semi-public forum” as Corvus Elrod muses, or “something like an 18th century Salon… serious chat with nice folks” as Chris Lepine claims at The Artful Gamer?
Much like the last time I did one of these things, I’m torn between wanting to give what I think is the right answer on behalf of all videogame bloggers everywhere, and how I actually feel – which may or may not speak for anybody else. In this particular case, I think I’ve got to opt with option 2.
Let me start at the beginning, then, and explain why I felt compelled to start a blog in the first place.
* * *
I started running a LiveJournal back in 2000, but didn’t start a videogame blog until 2004, when Gamespot unveiled their blog feature. I seem to recall wanting to start the blog as some sort of soapbox for ranting and raving about stupid videogame industry shit (in those days, my ire was mostly directed at EA), but in re-reading those old entries, it’s much less of the ranting and a lot more of just day-to-day, “here’s what I’m playing and what I think of it” kind of stuff, which (for whatever reason) I felt compelled to keep separate from my other, day-to-day blogging.
Well, but hold on a second – the “for whatever reason” in the above paragraph is kind of key, as it turns out. The reason I felt compelled to keep the game blog separate is because, in 2004, I felt like being a 29-year-old gamer was something shameful, and needed to be kept hidden. To the outsider, videogames were not something to be taken seriously; the stereotypical gamer was either a 13-year-old brat calling you a fag over XboxLive, wholly unaware of irony as he teabagged your corpse in Halo, or a 30-year-old, mother’s-basement-dwelling shut-in playing World of Warcraft for weeks at a time.
And that’s just what I assumed non-gamers thought of me. Actual gamers were much worse. I had eventually managed to find a tight-knit group on the Gamespot forums, but that’s because we were all jonesing for some civilized discourse – commenters on most game sites are were just as vile and troll-ish as they were online. It was impossible to carry a coherent conversation without a bunch of jackasses ruining it for everybody else.
Despite the yada yada of video games’ growing cultural prominence, the amount of money they make (and lose), and the simple reality that maybe no creative medium has ever moved further faster, most people don’t take video games very seriously. I realize this comes as a shock to precisely no one who doesn’t play video games. Sometimes the fact that games are written off as adolescent nonsense bugs me. Sometimes it doesn’t, because a lot of games — a lot of great games — are adolescent nonsense. And sometimes I think that the worst thing to happen to video games would be for them to get taught widely in schools and reviewed in The New Yorker. As the novelist and critic (and gamer!) John Lanchester once wisely noted, “Respectability is a terrible thing for any art form. People wrote better novels when the cultural status of the novel was contested.”
* * *
9 years and 3 urls later, I’m still trying to figure out why I keep doing this.
I’d like to say it’s because I’m trying to “be a part of the conversation”, but the thing about having a blog is that it is, by definition, a monologue. If I ask questions in my posts, they’re generally rhetorical in nature; I’m not doing this for the feedback. Sometimes, I’m working out my own critical thinking in this space; other times I’m responding to the analyses of other critics; more often than not, I’m simply trying to keep track of what I’m playing and what I’m thinking about what I’m playing.
This idea of a “blog moot” / “bloot” is interesting to me, though. Like Chris Bateman says:
… not all blogging is about community. My problem, and presumably Chris Lepine’s as well, is that right now none of the blogging is about community, which is a serious step down from where we were not that many years ago. So the situation going forward needs to be to leave the door open for community, when it is appropriate.
My first real blogging experience was on LiveJournal, which very much was a community. Sure, it was primarily a place for me (and others) to vent about stupid shit and to navel gaze, but I quickly found a group of people who were venting and navel gazing about the same things, and so even though we were still just monologuing, we were doing it together. It wasn’t nearly as cacophonous as it sounds.
Is it possible to get a gamer-blog network up and running? Our own private Tumblr? Where it would be easier for game bloggers to find each other, to read each other, and to communicate with one another? Or does turning it into just another social network defeat the larger purpose?
(I think I’m going to continue this in a second post; for now, I want to send this off and see what happens.)
[This post is written for the July 2013 round of Blogs of the Round Table; read other submissions here:]
Still trying to process yesterday’s tragic news. The internet’s collective outpouring of love, support and grief went a long way And of course now I’m wondering if there will be a Bombcast today, and, if so, whether I’ll be able to handle it.
As for things bumming me out that actually directly affect my life, today is doubly tough because it was my son’s first day of day care. I had to drop him off before I left for work, and he was already unhappy before I finished getting him out of the stroller. I peeked through the window right before I left, and he was sitting on one of the older women’s laps, crying, not wanting the offered pacifier. Broke my heart to leave him, but I was already running late for work.
In any event, it seems a bit harder than usual to talk about videogames, so I’m going to cut-and-paste and re-write a draft from last week that I never got around to finishing, and maybe that will help me get back on track.
* * *
Finished Call of Juarez: Gunslinger [July 1st]. That’s a fun little game, I have to say. I may have made this comparison before; it’s Bastion plus Bulletstorm in the Old West, which is a better-sounding combo than you’d think. It took me about 5 hours to get through the story, and while it really wasn’t towards the end of the game that I started to feel like I was getting good at it, I still had a pretty good time overall. Certainly worth picking up in a Summer Sale, if such an offering is available, but even at $20 it’s money well spent.
* * *
I also managed to finish The Last of Us over the long weekend. I finished it on “Easy”, and I understand from reading other TLOU articles that doing so prevented me from really feeling the game, but I don’t buy that; the game was plenty difficult even on Easy, because Clickers will always one-hit kill you, and sometimes the PS3 controller doesn’t do what I ask of it. I’m guessing the biggest advantage in Easy was that I had more ammo, but I still generally tried to stealth my way around whenever possible.
It’s a remarkable experience (that opening sequence is one of the best of all time), and it’s certainly a landmark technical achievement (certainly in the top 5 best-looking/sounding games of this generation), and yet it’s also a game that I don’t think I want to play again. It’s too dark, too soul-crushing, too depressing; I’m glad I experienced it the first time, but I don’t see what I would gain through a second playthrough beyond finding all the hidden collectibles – and one does not play The Last of Us to find hidden collectibles.
* * *
I mentioned this at the bottom of one of last week’s posts; I’ve gotten back into Need For Speed Most Wanted, which is surprising given how disappointed I was when I tried playing it on the 360 last year. The PC experience is a completely different beast, however; it is absolutely gorgeous, for one thing, and the game experience feels a lot more polished and smooth than the 360 version. And so now that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, I’m finally able to appreciate what Criterion was trying to do.
I think I was always going to be disappointed after it first launched, because even without the technical problems I was having on the 360, my primary issue was always that I really wanted NFSMW to be Burnout Paradise 2, and because it wasn’t, I couldn’t really judge it fairly and objectively. The Need for Speed brand meant nothing to me, and my intense love of all things Criterion couldn’t save me from eventually walking away from the (still-excellent) Hot Pursuit.
But now that I’ve had a few months to forget about my first run and can finally see it with clearer eyes, I’m actually pretty impressed. If anything, it’s a lot more like Burnout Paradise than I was willing to give it credit for – and I might even argue that it’s got a better (or at least more intuitive) career progression than BoP.
Sometimes I get intimidated by non-linear games – I mean, I appreciate that I have all this freedom, but unless I’m doing something constructive I feel lost and/or overwhelmed. (This is why Skyrim‘s quests will always be more appealing to me than Minecraft‘s sandbox.) What I do appreciate, though, is that even if you’re not racing, there’s still lots of side things to do – security gates to crash, hidden cars to unlock, billboards to jump through. And in the meantime, if you actually want to advance in the game, there’s lots of ways to do that – each car you find has its own series of races to complete (with noticeable performance-improving incentives for finishing 1st), and once you accumulate enough of whatever the XP equivalent is, you can engage in the game’s version of Boss Battles.
I’m spending too long talking about a game that came out last year that nobody else is playing, but still – if it shows up on sale (and I happened to pick it up for $15 during an Amazon Digital Download sale), it’s a damn fun time – especially (as I noted above) if you’re playing on PC, which is miles ahead of the 360 version.
* * *
Finally, I can’t not talk about the GTA V gameplay trailer that came out this morning. Obviously, if you’re reading this post you’ve already watched it, but just in case you want to watch it again:
I don’t really know what else to say about it, other than I love how Rockstar’s been doing these “informercial”-ish trailers for the last few years. (I seem to recall Red Dead Redemption getting this sort of treatment, and certainly Max Payne 3 had some as well.)
And I suppose I could point out that it appears as if they’re adapting certain elements of RDR’s combat system, which is very good news indeed. (One of the reasons why RDR remains one of my favorite games of all time is because the gunplay was immensely fun and satisfying in all the ways that GTA IV‘s was not.)
And while I don’t necessarily see this game getting as far-out crazy as San Andreas did (i.e., I’d be very surprised to see a jetpack), it certainly does look as though they’re incorporating a lot more of the side stuff that made San Andreas as compulsively playable as it was (i.e., tennis, parasailing, long-distance cycling, etc.). As long as there’s no David Cross-narrated model plane combat side mission, we’re good to go.
Shouts From The Couch 