“Adam, why are you doing this? Why are you listing all the games you played in the past few weeks and writing brief blurbs about them?” you ask, your eyes locking with mine. Our heartbeats thump in tandem; two creatures, independent and impossibly alone, united for a single instant.
“Because, my love,” I respond, my gaze shifting to the stars; always above us; always watching. “Because I want to write about games but I’m too fucking lazy to do anything longform. And if I dress this drivel up as an actual piece someone will expect me to mean something.”
WHAT I HAVE BEEN PLAYING THESE DAYS:
CITIES: SKYLINES
I’m a sick man. A very, very sick man. All I want to do is sit around and build roads. I could build roads all day long, brother. I can also start a shocking number of short-lived settlements that take out loans with reckless abandon and quickly descend into poverty-stricken bedlam. Like, three or four of them a night.
I picked a stupid game to start this out with.
One of the things I like about videogames is that they make sense out of the chaos. They’re little man-made realities that have their own rules and their own meanings. You can win them, which is startlingly different from our reality, where you mostly writhe around, cower a little, suffer, and die. No one wins here.
And that’s what bums me out about Cities: Skylines. You can’t win it. There’s just progression and progression and no end. Mammon upon mammon until managing the whole god-forsaken endeavor becomes too taxing to be satisfying anymore. If you’re doing finger guns and saying SOUNDS LIKE MY SOCIAL LIFE HAHAHAHAH then we’re on the same page here.
Anyway: Cities is exactly like SimCity. If there are any significant differences between the two–I’m talking things beyond arcane city-builder-fan minutiae–I couldn’t name them. It is extremely addictive, just like SimCity. And, uh, I don’t know. You build roads and lay down zones and build infrastructure and then you watch the little people come live in your place.
Also you move sliders. Taxes and budgets, things like that.
Beyond videogames I also really like to listen to music. I mean that in the most pretentious way possible: I like to listen to music, man, to really feel it in my soul and enter a correspondence of the mind with the artist, transcending time and space.
A lot of videogames, with their demands of fast reaction times and close attention, make this activity hard. But Cities is fantastic for it. The pace is even slow enough for me to say things like the “The interplay between the bass and drums here is creating a great space for the guitar lines to breathe,” or, “The guitar work here is full of delicate, hopeful intricacy,” alone, in my room, to no one, as cold, steely tears fall into my coffee cup–without so much as a single thing going awry in my digital city.
CLOSING THOUGHT: I will likely sink a lot of hours into this game but christ somebody put some kind of objective-based mode in here to stave off my existential crisis. Also if you play it make sure you download some mods.
VERDICT: Definitely some insufferable bullshit, but it takes a while before you notice. What more can you ask?
CARD HUNTER
I played this a little bit. Actually, I tried to describe this game like two weeks ago when I started this piece and I had so much trouble with it that I completely stopped writing and started sulking. I don’t remember the game very well anymore. There was only one session and it was very late. I don’t think I was sober. What’s cool about Card Hunter is the setting is very unique (look at how stupid that sentence is–see why I stopped writing?).
I don’t know. Fucking Google it if you want to know more. I don’t get paid for this shit.
VERDICT ON CARD HUNTER: I was pretty stoked on it when I played it but I have no desire to play it again.
VERDICT ON WRITING ABOUT CARD HUNTER: Very difficult, do not attempt lest ye want to feel crippling self doubt.
SUIKODEN II
Somebody walked in and stole the PlayStation 4 out of my goddamn house last year so I had to try and emulate this oft-forgotten gem. I’ve never played it, but Suikoden the first is a personal favorite of mine. And my dude Jason Schreier at Kotaku never shuts up about it. So I know I need to play it.
Sadly, I could only get the game to work in a small corner of my television when I connected the computer via HDMI. So I didn’t play it at all. I will try again and report back.
VERDICT: Completely insufferable, pretty much ruined my night, played Chrono Trigger instead. Can I have my PS4 back please?
ARK: SURVIVAL EVOLVED
I don’t know if I’ve always been stoked on dinosaurs or if the internet hivemind just convinced me I should be. But at some point I decided I was thoroughly stoked on dinos and paid like $30 for this game.
One of the things you need to understand about me is I have a fetish for building bases. There is no greater joy in videogames: just let me construct a stronghold with my allies and hang out in it. If I can fill it with NPCs and storage spaces and crafting stations, even better. ARK: Survival Evolved lets you do that kind of thing, which counts for a lot.
If I’m being sincere, the first night I played this game was really fun. My roommate and I entered the world–a big island with some random meaningless technology and lots of dinosaurs–and spent a long time exploring. There is no real map, and it’s big place where you can go anywhere. It’s scary and overwhelming. Everything you meet is a threat, from the dinosaurs to the other players (who can kill you if you play on a PvP server, which I do because I’m not a filthy casual).
I pretty much ignored the dinosaurs and spent my time harvesting resources. With the end goal of building a giant fortification to ward off dinosaurs and invasive players a like.
In ARK, when you die, you respawn but everything in your inventory gets left at the place you were killed. This can be very frustrating, but the trade-off is you actually get to care. So you run from dinosaurs and hide from other players with the interest of not completely invalidating the time investment you just made pulling 1,000 stone from the quarry. Sadistic, yes, but also effective.
You can also tame dinosaurs and ride them, which is pretty dope. The actual game-act of taming a dinosaur is something I’ve done very little of–I’M A BUILDER BABY–but I can tell you that it’s a profoundly unsatisfying experience which I would now like to use a half-baked example of why I hate videogames.
Look back at all you’ve just read. I was just rattling off features, trying to paint a picture of the game. And it sounds pretty cool, right? Now allow me to explain what all that shit looks like in the terms of actually playing it (this is pretty much the whole play loop of the thing):
- You hit trees and rocks and shit to get resources from them. (So you just click over and over.)
- You fiddle with menus to make the resources into other things, such as tools to help you hit-shit-and-get-resources faster. (“Click better.”)
- You use tools and resources to build bases, which is actually fun.
- You use tools and resources to tame dinosaurs, which consists of beating them unconscious and force-feeding them berries for hours. I wish I was joking. (Read: Basically a repackage of steps one and two.)
- You die and have to repeat these steps over and over.
VERDICT: Everything but building bases and the first 3-4 hours of the core play loop are INSUFFERABLE BULLSHIT.
CHRONO TRIGGER
I just restarted this one with the intent of playing it all the way through–probably my third or fourth time. It’s Chrono Trigger, so you already know: quietly brilliant and absolutely charming.
The genius of this game is the plotting, the way it crisply throws you from one set piece to the next.
It makes the whole silent protagonist thing not just tolerable but enjoyable. The script is written in a way that you know how Chrono responds to things, but not always what exactly he said. He could be snarky, sad, scared, whatever. You fill in the details of his personality yourself, and I’d like to imagine everyone’s Chrono is a reflection of themselves. Mine definitely has parts of me in him. And that makes me root for the guy in a way that I can’t for other protagonists. Because I am narcissistic and self absorbed!
Also Frog is just the coolest. And that soundtrack. Is Chrono Trigger the most beautiful SNES game? Probably.
VERDICT: 10000000% perfect.
GRAND THEFT AUTO V
GTAV is a technically astounding videogame with the plot and tone of a movie I would not want to go see. It offers a toxic and useless pseudo-critique of modern culture. It commits the cardinal sin of presenting bombast as substance and (misplaced) vitriol as message. I’m late to the party here, I know.
Also, I can’t stomach more than a few hours of its shit. The game is gorgeous and has a really good soundtrack, shoutout to Jay Rock. I am often just really baffled by how much people like this thing. To look at it strictly mechanically, it’s an above-average racing game with a shitty RPG and shittier shooter grafted on top.
It simulates “real life” in a way that I think fascinates people, but does it really amount to much more than there are people walking down the street and it occasionally makes me do extremely mundane tasks?
I think the voice acting is well done even though they’re basically just regurgitating hot vomit into your ears.
The pace is bad. The multiple-POV structure is wasted opportunity to actually say something about the characters and their role in GTAV’s fucked up world. Instead, it’s just an excuse to make gags about Trevor waking up with a seagull up his ass or whatever.
When I play it I feel like I do when I watch Entourage: kind of into it if I’m being honest (HI MY NAME IS ADAM I’M A WHITE DUDE THAT LIKES WISH FULFILLMENT WHAT’S UP??) but also deeply, deeply ashamed. I can only ignore the total vacuity for so long.
Fuck this game.
VERDICT: Absolutely and irrefutably insufferable, burn your discs and harddrives and read a fucking book instead you degenerates.
HEARTHSTONE
I have played this game a lot, and not just recently. It is perfect.
All of our hopes and dreams. Our risks, our gambles, our insecurities, our vanities: all on display, refracted endlessly upon themselves. The thrill of bloodsport, ancient, recalled through ancestral memory. Sun Tzu. Napoelon. Shakespeare, Homer, Campbell, and more.
Hearthstone is a rubric’s cube where the only solution is accepting your own foolishness and trying to defeat it, match in and match out. Those who would blame their losses on randomness, on the luck of the draw, are simply too proud to see their fault. But fear not: Hearthstone teaches us all, eventually, though some lessons do not come without a price.
(That wasn’t a sly critique of Hearthstone’s trend towards play-to-win, but I won’t stop you from reading it that way.)
In closing, fuck face hunters, my girlfriend bought me a 50 pack of boosters for the new expansion and I’m going pro once that shit comes out have ya’ll seen those cards!?, also yo Blizz what’s a dude got to do to get Dr. Boom these days?????
VERDICT: Only game that matters.
insufferable bullshit 