Working on My Night Moves: Cyberpunk 2077

Before I write my 2020 year-in-review, I wanted to put proverbial pen to equally proverbial paper about my time with the last two games I played in 2020, starting with one of the most avidly discussed games of the year: Cyberpunk 2077.

The discourse around the release of Cyberpunk is fascinating in its own right, but I’m not about to get into much of that. Like others, my experience with the game was impacted by expectations based on unfulfilled promises and years of hype, but I did my best to distance my immediate experience with the game from what I thought the game “should” be. It was hard, though, as it always is when a game is hyped to hell and back. And I’m not here to cast blame, as I think the fault in this particular situation is spread pretty equally between CD Projekt Red, gamers, and media coverage. The more I played the game, the more I felt empathy for anyone having to review it. Every time I found myself disappointed at something I felt was missing or underdeveloped in the game, I tried to take a step back and gain some perspective. What would I think of this game if I had never heard anything about it? If I had never played The Witcher 3? If I had no clue about what this game was supposed to be? So my thoughts here are mostly a result of a struggle to maintain that perspective while also being honest with myself about the many ways this game failed me. [Spoilers ahead]

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my experience in Night City. As a fan of open-world RPGs, I really liked some of the core gameplay, and the narrative was also pretty solid. I love getting absolutely immersed in RPGs – feeling like I am in this world, living this life, making these choices. But I frequently felt like the game kept me from feeling thoroughly immersed and lost in the fantasy of this really cool world that the developers built for me. It started with the character creator. While I was able to make a character that did look a lot like me, I was kind of surprised by how limited my choices were, especially because you can’t change them later. I went into this game with the perception that everyone’s V would be super unique, but given how (relatively) limited the options are in the character creator, I imagine there are a lot of very similar looking Vs out there. That wouldn’t be a big deal if you could go out into the world and get custom tattoos, hair styles, eyes, etc., but you can’t.

That (admittedly very minor) disappointment set the tone for my early hours in the game. Every new mechanic or system came with some level of “…oh. Okay.” The driving is very unsatisfying, the shooting felt loose and imprecise until I got a very good gun, the city streets felt empty and not nearly as bustling and full of life as I’d expected, and then there were the numerous bugs and crashes that have been widely documented by others. I played the PS4 version on a PS5, so it wasn’t even the worst version of it. It crashed 36 times in my playthrough, and virtually every play session was filled with little odd bugs and glitches here and there. Cars falling from the sky, sound going in and out, objects floating where they shouldn’t be, I fell through the floor a couple of times, and more. The clunkiness wasn’t limited to the bugs, though. There seemed to be some questionable design and balance issues, too. The biggest of these confusing decisions is probably how shallow the life paths seemed. From the previews and interviews released over the last couple of years, I was expecting the opening hours of the game to be spent on a very specific set of missions that shaped your character through the lens of whatever life path you chose. As a Nomad, I was looking forward to hours in the desert, learning combat and exploration while hearing tell of the seedy and shady deals going on in the big, scary city. The game had different plans. I started in a garage in the desert, sure. Then a very stereotypical small-town sheriff came in and gave me a very stereotypical “your kind ain’t welcome ‘round here *spits*” lecture. I say “stereotypical” but I was into it. “I’m just passing through,” I said to him, certain he would rue the day he treated me so sore. I just knew our paths would cross again as I went about my business in their small rural town. He would probably be my first rival. A nemesis I’d have to take down just before embarking on my ultimate journey into the heart of the city.

The game said “lol cute story but no. Go to the city. Go to the city now,” and almost immediately put me on course to head to the city. Worse, I couldn’t even explore the opening desert area. I left that garage after reassuring the sheriff I meant no trouble, parked at a nearby diner to look around and start exploring the world, and almost as soon as I got out of my car I had a warrant issued and the police chased me down and killed me. For stepping out of my car. This was a game design choice. One that seems specifically meant to dissuade exploration and experimentation. They wanted me to stay on track and get to the mission that would bring me to the city, so I barely felt like my life path choice meant anything. I was talking with my friend Tab at the time, and we agreed that it feels like the developers must have gutted the life paths. After that brief rural opening, there is a fast moving montage of my exploits with my new friend, Jackie. This seemed like shorthand meant to make up for all of the character development and gameplay onboarding that was supposed to take place in the opening life path section of the game. Further, once I was in the city and doing missions, some things felt unbalanced, like stealth and hacking. Later in the game, I appreciated the different ways that you could approach some missions. It was clear that real thought had gone into making some levels satisfying regardless if you went in and hacked everything, snuck around and took people down stealthily, or charged in guns blazing. Early on, however, the hacking and stealthing paths seemed impossible or just out of reach, even if you allocated lots of perk points to those skills. Now, that could be poor, lazy design and balance, but if you imagine that a chunk of the early game was jettisoned, it actually makes sense. If players were meant to spend 10-15 hours doing missions and exploring their respective life paths before starting the shared mainline missions, then they would probably have enough experience/perk points to take on those early missions in a variety of ways, instead of being forced to defaulting to mainly guns.

I didn’t want to spend this much time griping, but here we are, I guess. Before I get into the things I liked, one last complaint. In pre-release material, CD Projekt Red made a big deal about the myriad styles in the game and your ability to mix and match to find a style that best fits “your” V (which, let me slip in an extra complaint and say that I felt like V was very much not “mine,” and I wish I had had more influence over his behavior and attitude). Maybe there are combinations of clothing that work, but I was almost always walking around town looking like a goofy, gaudy Kevin Federline impersonator (you are very welcome for that incredibly dated reference). It’s a byproduct of an RPG where everything is stat based, sure, but that conflicts with the immersive aspect of an open-world narrative where you’re really trying to inhabit your character. I can mix and match elements to create an okay looking outfit, or I can actually survive gunfights and pick the pieces that have the best stats. I chose the latter, and because the game is in first person I would often forget about what I was wearing. I would start getting into the story and feeling really in-character, like an up-and-coming badass, ready to climb my way to the top of Night City. Then I would see something cool and pop into screenshot mode. And I ope.

Okay, okay, I can hear you saying “didn’t you say you liked the game and enjoyed your time with it? That’s not what I’m reading here.” And now I can hear you saying “uh, how can you hear me? I’m not a real person and even if I were, we’d be miles apart.” And I have no answer for that other than to say stop sassing me, dear fictitious reader. I did mostly enjoy my time with the game. While the game certainly looks and feels clunky in places, there was also a lot of visual flair that I appreciated. I’m not at all an expert in the cyberpunk genre, but in my limited experience with it (mostly in film) I’ve seen a lot of noir and neo-noir influence, and I think it would be fun to study this game a bit more closely and look at how the style adds to or changes the meaning of some of the visuals. For example, the use of shadow (slatted or barred, particularly) is a key marker of the style, and certain scenes in the game used shadows in a very noir-esque way. In this shot, look at the use of lighting:

Barred shadows are often used to create a sense of mystery and distrust, sometimes conveying that the person they are cast on is dangerous or should be caged. The femme fatale, another staple of the genre, is usually the one framed in these shadows, and as her name implies, she is pretty often responsible for death later in the story. In the above shot, it’s Johnny Silverhand that is shadowed by straight but imperfectly spaced light coming through window shades. At this point in the story, Johnny’s motivations are still suspect. In our first encounter, he tried to kill me, but since then we’d established a tenuous but slightly more stable partnership. Still, the shadow here makes it clear that he may be the “femme” fatale, because in the fore of the shot there is a candle which ensures that no shadow falls on the only woman in the shot, Hanako Arasaka. She, in her royal-looking red and gold and regal gaze, is on one side of Johnny, while Goro Takemura, who is visually presented as a servant here (hands clasped, just having served her tea), is on his other side. We’ve come to trust Goro, who saved our life and was our partner on the mission that led to this exact moment. Our attention is on them, but Johnny’s placement between them, distance, and position in shadows, conveys a lot of meaning and contributes to his development as a character in relation to us. After a big gunfight where Hanako is “rescued” from us, we pass out, only to wake up in a seedy motel room, where this scene then takes place:

Two of the same characters (the woman is a stand-in or vessel for Hanako) in the same positions, but note how the shadows have changed. Johnny, who is closer now, is completely lost in shadow, and Hanako, who in the previous scene refused to help us, is now the one framed in lines of shadow. With her previous refusal to believe V and Goro, her intentions are now suspect (why does she want to talk now, and why send a “doll”?), and thus we have reason to doubt and suspect her. This suspicion plays an important role in her involvement in the main story and, eventually, your choices that affect the ending of the game. So, while the moment-to-moment visuals of the game weren’t always perfect, there is a lot of cool and important visual flair and framing going on, and this is just one example of that.

Another visual thing that I appreciated was the lighting and reflections. No, I’m not talking about the mirrors that are somehow less user friendly in the future. I mean the reflections on water or wet streets (another visual feature of the noir style, but I digress). I would often catch myself stopping my bike to take a screenshot of the way a sign or building was reflecting off of the slick street. The rain itself looked like butt, but the resulting streets after a rain were nice. Or the way the reflection of this neon sign reveals the texture of the wallpaper by reflecting differently off of the shiny and matte parts of it, and how it also reflects softly off of the gun I’m holding.

I mostly liked the main story, but it was some of the side quests and subplots that really stuck with me, for better or worse. There were a couple of storylines that I felt wrapped up too hastily, like Judy and Evelyn’s, but there were some really impactful moments within those stories. It was moments like those, whether dire or celebratory, that made the overall sloppiness of the game that much more disappointing. The cool or dark or fun stories that they weave shows that CD Projekt Red has retained some of the talent that contributed to some of the stellar storytelling in The Witcher 3, so it’s sad to see it buried under the game’s other issues. I gave a spoiler warning at the beginning of the post, but I’ll throw another one out because I’m about to go into a bit of detail about one of the game’s most memorable side quests. Said quest begins innocuously enough, with you agreeing to help someone avenge his murdered wife by killing her killer. It turns out the murderer is in police protection and on his way to be crucified on air to seemingly atone for his sins. Has he really repented? Is he being manipulated by the corporations? These are questions asked of you as you shift your aid from the widower to the convicted murderer. In the end, if you make the choices I did, you end of being the one physically nailing him to a wooden cross in front of cameras. It’s a pretty grotesque scene, but it’s not played for shock in the same way it might have played out in a Grand Theft Auto game. It’s dealing in visual shock, certainly, but it is also doing what interesting science fiction or futuristic stories do and asking what becomes of certain social elements in the future. In this city, which is well established by this point in the story to be a battleground for corporate greed and opportunist greed, where everything seems packaged and sold for the masses, what becomes of something like Christianity? This quest offers a pretty grim answer: it’s still thriving, so much so that the audience for this live execution is big enough to be worth some corp a whole lot of money.

Speaking of that quest, the producer who is tasked with keeping the doomed convict on schedule is Rachel, and while she might have been a major beeyatch, she was also a major hottie, and it made me wish the romance system was bigger and more flexible. I’m glad they kept romances in the game, because I’d read rumors that they might end up being cut as they neared deadline and were making significant content cuts to make their final release window. But in early preview discussions of the game, it seemed like maybe they’d planned on allowing players to romance a number of characters. As it stands, I think no matter what the build your V is, every player only has two possible characters that they can romance. For me, it was Panam and River. I really liked Judy and would have loved to romance her, but I do like that they give characters their own sexuality and everyone isn’t just magically bisexual, like they are in other games with romance systems. Do I want the option to date everyone? Sure. But I can’t deny that it helps to define characters better if their sexuality is a part of their character and not a result of giving players a chance to bang everyone. Having said that, it would be great and more in line with the original promise of Night City if there were a number of characters to romance throughout the city. Like Rachel, who is not a good person and is probably very mean but who would probably step on my neck if I asked nicely and offered something of value to her career. So, yes, please.

I spent a lot of time with this game (even got the platinum trophy!) so I could go on, but I’ll quickly tack on a few thoughts and then wrap this up. The racing was pretty bad, but I thought it was important to have a trans character in such a prominent role (even if she was imperfect). I really liked Goro, which made his final message to you in most of the endings very sad. They really did him dirty. I liked that Keanu had such a big role, and I enjoyed the relationship between V and Johnny a lot. Overall, as I said, I did like playing the game; it was just frustratingly unfinished and sloppy. As an English teacher, it reminded me of the kind of paper I might grade where I’m like “this is an excellent draft! Now let’s make it an excellent paper.” Because, as a draft, this game does introduce some really cool ideas and systems. It just has some formatting and grammar issues that make it hard to “read.” I think Cyberpunk 2078 (or whatever it ends up being called) will be a realization of all of the ambition that went unfulfilled with this entry.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

When I pre-ordered my PlayStation 4, I took advantage of an offer from Sony where you got three launch games for the price of two. Like most launch lineups, it was slim pickings, but I went with Killzone Shadow Fall (because it was one of the only made-for-next-gen choices), Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Black Flag was my first AC game and I absolutely fell in love with it. I spent many hours over that winter break clearing every icon on the map and wishing I could pirate around the Caribbean forever. I was so into the game that I’ve since bought and played Assassin’s Creed, AC 2, AC 3, Brotherhood, Revelations, Syndicate, Origins, and Odyssey. I’m not as into the Vikings theme as many others seem to be, but I liked Origins and Odyssey enough that Valhalla was still a definite day one purchase. What complicated matters, though, was the fact that the game was originally slated to launch just a week before Cyberpunk 2077, a game I knew I wanted to play at launch alongside my friends. Well, when Cyberpunk was delayed by three weeks, I felt like a month would be enough time to finish Valhalla before I found my way to the streets of Night City. I was a few days off. [Some spoilers ahead]

I’m framing my experience like this because those last few days of finishing the game felt torturous. I have a very hard time putting games aside without beating them, especially if I’ve already sunk many hours into them. I wasn’t about to stop playing Valhalla when Cyberpunk came out because I was, I thought, right near the end of the game. Except I wasn’t. The game’s narrative structure is a bit loose, because like the last couple of AC games there are multiple branches of the broad, overarching story, each with its own quest lines. You have Eivor’s storyline, the Brotherhood storyline, the present day (Order of the Ancients) storyline, and the Asgard storyline, all independent yet woven together to form the “whole” story. This isn’t necessarily different than Origins or Odyssey, which had similar structures, but the game isn’t exactly clear about how these elements fit together. When I reached the “end” of Eivor’s storyline, I was legitimately unsure if I’d “beat” the game. Further, even after I’d finished the other storylines, it didn’t feel like the storylines had converged in a satisfying way. I think this was, in part, due to the way the last several stretches in Eivor’s story drag on and on. Just when you think you’ve done the last thing, they open a new area that you’re required to conquer. And that word, “required,” is what I think is to blame for my annoyance with the last chunk of the narrative.

Before I get into that, let me say that I understand pacing is a very difficult thing to nail in an open world game. When you give your players the freedom to explore an open world, complete side quests unrelated to the main quest, and finish segments of the narrative whenever they choose, you are essentially leaving the pace of the game and the narrative in their hands. You can include things to remind the player of the main narrative or incentivize main quests over side quests, but the more you do so the more you risk making your players feel more restricted and less “free” in this open world you’ve set up for them. So, it’s a balance, but even when you get it mostly right, players can be their own worst enemies. I have to admit that when I hear people talk about an open world game having “too much side content” or “poor pacing” (due to the aforementioned side content), I want to snap a controller in half. Not really. They are so expensive now. Anyway, it makes me angry. Because side content is, if a game is pretty well designed, optional. You don’t need to participate in any of it. So, if you do, and if that makes you like the game less or feel that the narrative is paced poorly, that is explicitly on you, right? You had a choice to go through the narrative at your own pace or to ignore side content, and you chose not to. How is that the game’s fault? We should celebrate open world games that allow for varying experiences, where one person can mainline the story in a manageable amount of time and another can spend many more hours with optional side content.

My problem with Valhalla’s pacing is that much of the content is not optional. Even if we leave aside the grinding (of side content) that seems required to be high enough in level to complete main missions, in order to “truly” complete the game, you have to go through all of the above mentioned storyline quests. You have to go through all of Eivor’s missions, all of the Asgard missions, all of the present day missions, and all of the Brotherhood missions. In addition to this, the game leads you to believe you’re approaching the climax several times, only to then introduce a new area that you must go through all of the steps to conquer and move the story along.

If I was playing this game in isolation, during a slow summer, maybe I wouldn’t have been quite as irked as I was by it. But we are in one of the busiest release windows in recent memory, and I have a new console and several new games to play. And I stand by my complaint that the interweaving of the four narrative branches is loose and unclear, and I think that played directly into my issue with the pace as well. When added to a few very irksome bugs (which seem laughable now that I’ve also just completed Cyberpunk, but more on that in the next post) and confusing “world events,” which have replaced side quests (so they’re essentially side quests under a different name and with a worse tracking system), I was left somewhat disappointed in Valhalla. Does that mean I disliked it? No! I decided to start with my negative impressions because the crush of new consoles and games to play is clearly affecting how I consume media, so it all felt very relevant and timely. But there was a lot to like about Valhalla, too.

I know there are some people that are annoyed at the series’ move away from stealth and toward open combat, and I have mixed feelings about it. I thought that by the time they got to Black Flag, Ubisoft had gotten very good at designing forts and other areas that required you to find one of several stealthy ways to infiltrate and topple. But sometimes, in my impatience, I wanted to just rush in and murder a bunch of bad guys and move on. Where it was very difficult to do that in previous games, it is very easy (and, in fact, preferred) in Valhalla. Especially as I gained levels and became more powerful, it felt very cathartic to vent my frustrations by running straight into battle, an axe in each hand, flinging myself into hordes of enemies and severing limbs and heads with relative ease. Returning to a previously challenging area later in the game, when I was very powerful, was particularly satisfying, as I felt I was exacting bloody revenge on the foes that had once given me such a hard time.

The game is also gorgeous. As with Origins and Odyssey, I spent a whole lot of time in photo mode, mostly capturing shots of the game’s incredible lighting and atmospheric effects. As I was sifting through my screenshots after playing Origins I remember thinking “how many shots of the sun did I need?” Then, with Odyssey, I had the same problem and thought “hah, I did it again.” And, now, well… I just have to resign myself to the fact that I will always walk away from a new AC game with dozens of screenshots of the sun. Rising. Setting. Behind a cloud. Behind a building. By the water. By a mountain. By itself. I have a problem, okay?

In addition to the graphics being great, Ubisoft continues to be masters of the physicality of open worlds. They are so good at creating topographic and geological environments, and I don’t think they get enough credit for it. I get it. With so much content in a game, how often do you have time to slow down and appreciate the way a river flows from a glacial peak, down to a small lake that feeds into a waterfall that has shorn jagged cliffs into the mountainside and created a system of caves? I found myself taking time to appreciate these things pretty often, but if I had time (and incentive) I would love to spend hours just travelling around the intricately designed worlds of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, just looking for interesting and beautiful geographic features. A small example that I stupidly did not get a screenshot of: I saw a small tree that was set into an outcropping of rock in a hilly field. The rock on that side of the hill had crumbled, leaving a cleft in the hill, and where the ground became soft and probably mineral-rich, a small tree had been lucky enough to take root. It wasn’t special. There was no particular purpose to it. But some designer had thought about the environment closely and with such care that they added this small detail that most people would probably never even notice or think about. This kind of environmental detail is why, for whatever flaws they might have, I will probably always love these kinds of AC games.

Though the setting of ninth century England wasn’t quite as iconic as Ancient Greece or Egypt, there were some fun places to explore and odd allusions here and there. One of my favorite things to do was find and explore abandoned Assassins bureaus around the country. In fact, I wish there was a bit more to them than a brief environmental/platforming segment and a few scrolls. But I did like them enough as-is, and reading the scrolls left behind was a nice way to tie the long-standing Assassins’ story in with the current history of the region.

Some of the allusions and Easter eggs I ran across seemed very appropriate, and some just seemed… odd. Robin Hood’s band of merry men? Makes sense! A side quest that is based on and directly named after one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Duh! A character made to look like The Prodigy’s Keith Flint, who asks you to beat up a bishop while he and his band sings “Smack My Bishop”? Yea- wait, what? I mean, yeah, they’re an English band, but what an odd choice. There are tonnes (see what I did there? With the British spelling? Because it’s a game set in England? I should delete this) of very famous British bands that they could have used. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. The Spice Girls. That one with the dumb, unoriginal, angry brothers. Why The Prodigy? One of my favorite side quests/allusions was obtaining Excalibur, though. I waited until I was pretty much done with everything else in the game before embarking on that particular journey, and I kind of wish I’d sought it earlier. I definitely liked the dual axe thing, but the journey to find Excalibur was very satisfying and using it as a weapon was fun.

And to cram in a few more scattershot thoughts, I will say I thought the depiction of three religions (Paganism, Old Norse, and Christianity) trying to coexist was interesting. At one point, Eivor says “their soft god,” referring to Jesus, which I thought was very amusing. I loved that you could not only pet and cuddle the cats in the game, but you could have a ship cat! A cat! On your ship! Speaking of ships, the naval stuff was meh. Nothing will beat pirating on the open seas, but I guess I wasn’t expecting it to. I did love my rainbow ship decorations, though, with matching happy, smiling shields. Very tonally appropriate. The three witch sisters (the Daughters of Lerion) might have been my favorite quest in the game. They were super hard and reminded me of the Valkyries in God of War, but beyond that I loved their backstory of fallen family, betrayal, and vengeance. The fishing kind of sucked. But you do get into a rap battle with a squirrel at one point, so you win some, you lose some. Overall, I did like the game, but the pacing issues, seemingly sloppy mission design in some areas, and bugs, kept it from being among my favorite AC games.

PS5 and the Majesty of a New Generation

Welp. It’s finally here. After all of the hype and anticipation, I received my pre-ordered PlayStation 5 on release day, luckily enough. I have to say, one of the things I failed to mention in my post about previous console launches is the insidious worry that the coveted console that you have been waiting months for… might not live up to the hype. In the yesteryears of gaming, that wasn’t much of a concern. The leap in graphical and audio presentation alone between console generations was enough to satisfy an excited enthusiast such as myself. You didn’t move from an SNES to an N64 and think “eh, this is okay, I guess.” But starting with the PS3/Xbox 360 era, there was a valid concern that your shiny new console might just be a slightly faster, barely more powerful version of the box you’ve been playing on for the last half decade. The question many people would ask going into a new generation is “is the upgrade worth it?” And that question is difficult to answer when virtually no one has played the new machines, not to mention the fact that the earliest games on the platform surely don’t showcase its true potential (unless you’re Nintendo and you release genre-defining games right off the bat).

I don’t want to give the impression that this was a huge concern for me. I’ve yet to become the old, cynical gamer that constantly and needlessly asks “do we really need this?” about every new console or feature. I hate that question, in fact, because it’s an exercise in futility. We don’t “need” any new video game or console. That question seems often to be used as a rhetorical way of saying “I don’t want this new thing,” but it attempts to elevate it beyond a “want” and to include others in the assessment. I see it very often with movie and video game remakes or reboots. People will say “Ugh, do we really need a reboot of Jurassic Park?” Again, what they really mean is “I don’t want a reboot of Jurassic Park,” but that rightfully sounds selfish and petty, so reframing it as a problem that “we” are all facing softens the blow a bit. “We” seem to only “need” reboots of things that we like or approve of. One person may “need” a remake of Chrono Trigger, one may not. It’s a ridiculous argument that never serves anyone, but somehow it seems to have become a staple in discussions about new consoles.

I’m used to it from people outside of gaming. Friends, family members, people who don’t keep up with gaming and aren’t champing at the bit to spend hundreds of dollars on a new console frequently ask “is it worth it? Does it really do more than the console I already have? Why do I need to upgrade?” This generation, however, I have been surprised to hear these kinds of questions from a lot of people in the gaming industry and fan communities, though. On podcast after podcast, I hear hosts saying they probably aren’t going to buy one of the new consoles, or they wouldn’t get one if the company they worked for wasn’t providing them with one for review. On a pre-launch discussion episode of the GamesIndustry.biz podcast, the hosts were pretty much unified in how underwhelmed they were about the upcoming generation. The question “do we really need new consoles?” was asked specifically, and the person asking pointed to the recent spate of excellent titles, particularly on the PS4, as evidence that the current generation still had legs. Isn’t that how console generations work, though? Aren’t the best games always released at the end of a lifecycle? How long do we wait before taking the next step? Do we expect platform developers to wait for their competition to take that step first? They continued, lamenting the fact that there was nothing that truly screamed “next gen” about these consoles, other than the Quick Resume feature on the Xbox Series X.

I understand I am on a bit of a soapbox here, and I apologize for the rant. I was just struck by how loud the discourse seemed this time around, and it certainly contributed to the worry that maybe these consoles weren’t going to be as amazing as I wanted them to be – as much as it pains me to admit that the opinions of others was swaying my own, however slightly. So, regardless, I was somewhat worried that I would get my PS5, set it up, hit that power button… and be utterly underwhelmed. As with all of the other anxieties described in my previous post, this concern was quickly and thoroughly dismissed.

Before I get to gameplay or interface, let me set the scene and describe the ritualistic receipt of a new, divine device of fun made manifest. As my previous post probably illustrates, these launches are cherished events for me, and I treasure every moment. First, I have to comment on the unit’s size (okay, yes, that is what she said, now let’s move on). Again and again, I saw reports of how gargantuan the PS5 was. On social media and podcasts, gaming journalists reported that it was even bigger than they’d expected. Upon opening the exterior delivery box and removing the PS5 box itself, I was… not blown away by its size. It was heavy, yes, but if the box was any indication, the hype surrounding its hugeness seemed overblown. It was definitely bigger than the PS4 box, which I remember being surprisingly slight, but it wasn’t the mammoth I was expecting. The PS3 and original Xbox were pretty big systems, too, and their boxes were large, so this wasn’t the first chonky gaming console I’d seen. Bellatrix, my curious and much beloved kitty, hopped up to investigate what was stealing my attention away, so you have a sense of the PS5 box’s size in comparison to her. She is a small cat, less than ten pounds.

Also, I would be an absolute monster if I didn’t share this very important outtake of Bella’s impromptu photoshoot:

I mean…

Blep.

Anyway, so the exterior box didn’t exactly reinforce the “thick boi” reputation the system had gained. Pulling the system out of the box felt, as always, magical. As I gently removed the protective plastic wrapping, the size began to make more of an impression. Or did it? It certainly felt big, even outside of its weight. But when I put the system on the outer box, it again seemed smaller. And when I put the controller on top of it, it seemed absolutely average sized. Huh.

This trick of the eye, I would guess, is by design. I’m no artist or visual designer, but I imagine the curve of the upper and lower “blades,” the use of contrasting colors, and the tapering of the inner dark face from right to left were all done to trick the eye into thinking the system looks smaller than it is. I was very excited to find that it fits into my entertainment center, and planning out a new configuration for the systems connected to my TV was also weirdly exciting. I moved my PS4 Pro over a couple of slots and am leaving it hooked up as a dedicated PSVR system, and once I get an Xbox Series X I will disconnect my Xbox One and replace it with my 80GB PS3, giving me full access to the entire history of PlayStation games between the PS3 (fully backwards compatible with PS and PS2 games), PS4, and PS5.

One of the most important components of a new console launch is the controller, and I was very pleased by how good the DualSense controller felt in my hands. I don’t seem to be as picky about controllers as others, but I certainly have had my favorites. I thought the DualShock 4 was a much needed improvement over the previous PlayStation controllers and I was perfectly happy with it, but as soon as I held the DualSense I felt good about the prospect of holding it for many hours to come. The weight, the texture, the joysticks, and the clear buttons and directional pad, made this feel like a shiny new toy all its own, wholly separate from the console. The joysticks feel especially good, though that may just be the newness of the rubber coating. I am a little worried that they will wear away like the DualShock 4’s did, and I will be far more nervous about cracking these open to replace the sticks if I have to.

As I was connecting the system I noticed a fun little detail about the textured interior of the blades:

The setup process was mostly painless, though transferring my old game files was an ordeal. Before I get there, I want to say that I was very pleased with most of the setup process. Once I connected the PS5 to my network, it pulled over my profile and settings from the PS4 effortlessly. I also thought it was cool that it asks you to insert a game disc so that it could install the game and be ready to play by the time you get everything finalized. The fact that you could just check boxes for the games that you have installed on your PS4 to be copied over to your PS5 seemed amazing, but it proved a little too tempting. I almost checked a bunch of boxes, because if it was that easy, why not just copy them right over? Well, I thought twice and scaled back to just games I knew I was going to play: Grand Theft Auto V, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, Telling Lies, The Castlevania Anniversary Collection, a couple of the Jackbox games, and That’s You. In total, it was still over 200GB, and that should have been cause for reconsideration, but I stupidly went ahead with the transfer. Well, it took over twelve hours and within the last hour or two there was an error that prevented the Jackbox games and That’s You from being transferred, but other than that it went fairly smoothly. I only found out later that Sony has you use your home network to transfer profiles and game files because it helps prevent data caps from being exceeded (because you’re not downloading several massive game files from the internet). Fair enough, but it’s definitely a slower process.

Once everything was transferred over and I was able to log in, I was again pleasantly surprised by how intuitive the interface was. It’s a more compact, contained version of the PS4’s (and PS3’s, really) horizontal access bar design, so having that previous experience probably contributed to the sense that everything just felt right and made sense. There are several features I was pleasantly surprised by, and one (well, a lack of one) that I was not. The Remote Play feature, which allows you to play PS5 games on a PS4 system, is cool, though I don’t know how often I’ll use it. I also like that you can set things like difficulty, perspective, and performance/resolution in the system itself, and that they will automatically carry over into compatible games. Again, I’m not sure that I’ll use any of them very often, but it’s neat that they’re there. Perhaps even more surprising, and something I personally appreciate, is the ability to set the system to avoid spoilers. How cool is that for people like me, who hate spoilers? The feature that I was sad to find missing was a lack of support for themes. I remember an announcement from Sony not too long ago where they said they would not sell themes on PS5, but that any themes you purchased before they stopped selling them would still work. Maybe they just meant they would still work on your PS4, not your PS5, but I am very disappointed that I’m not able to use the incredibly beautiful Persona 5 Royal dynamic themes I fought so hard to get by platinum-ing the game and pleading with Atlus support for over a month. I’m hopeful they’ll find a way to integrate old themes with the new interface at some point.

Okay, I’ll probably have separate, more thorough posts for specific games later, but I want to talk briefly about a few, including the pack-in game Astro’s Playroom for a bit, because it’s a real showcase for the system’s features, particularly the DualSense’s haptic feedback. It can be difficult to explain how different and more specific the DualSense’s rumble and trigger pressure is than other controllers. To say that the rumble feels different when your character is inside a ball and rolls over different surfaces doesn’t adequately convey much. Previous controllers used variable speeds to make rumble feel different for different things. I remember vividly that in Metal Gear Solid for the PS1, one of the earliest games to use the first DualShock controller, when a helicopter was taking off the controller started vibrating lightly, and as the blades rotated faster the controller vibrated more and more. You could tell, however, that the vibrations were coming from the grips of the controller, where the motors were, and that remained true through the DualShock 4. The vibrations in the DualSense are so fine, though, that the sensation seems to come from various parts of the controller, even traveling throughout, including the triggers (since some of the sensation works in concert between the rumble and the haptic feedback).

Again, none of this really helps to truly describe the feeling. The game is designed to introduce you to a multitude of environments and situations that create different sensations, and there were a few that really made me perk up and realize the potential of this controller. The first was rain. I had been running around an early level and, sure, I could tell the difference in feedback as I ran across different surfaces. But when I first entered an area with rain, I was, as the kids say, shook. It felt like rain drops were impacting the controller. And when I moved to an area with heavier rain, the invisible drops on my controller also seemed to increase in size and intensity. This was more than simply “rumble.” Later, there are sections where your character is in a monkey suit and you have to climb upward. There are certain handles you can grab onto after a jump, and they zip you along a serrated track. I was again shocked by how much it felt like my controller was a real version of those virtual handles, because the sensation I felt seemed like exactly what I would expect if I were really zipping along that track. I could feel the bumps, the force of movement, and the sway when I stopped. I should note, too, that the controller’s built-in speaker seems leagues ahead of the speaker built into the DualShock 4.

With many of the haptic experiences in Astro’s Playroom, like the serrated track, I couldn’t tell how much of the experience was the feedback and how much was the sound, because they complimented each other so well. In the parts of the games where your character is in a frog suit, for example, you use the triggers to compress the spring under your character, then release to bounce away. As far as I can tell, three things happen when you do this. First, the trigger resistance is adjusted so that it feels harder to squeeze than usual. Second, the controller is vibrating slightly to give the sense of a spring tensing up. Third, the speaker projects the sound of a spring being compressed. This all sounds simple, probably, but it comes together so well that it truly does feel like your controller is making something spring forth. Speaking of the speaker, I also tested the controller’s built-in microphone and speaker for chat, which is something I had low expectations for. It worked shockingly well. I tried it with two friends, one of them for almost four hours, and it was almost as good as using a chat app on your phone (with speakerphone on, of course).

I played a lot of Astro’s Playroom by myself, but I had a couple of friends over (hi, Amy and Russell!) the day after I got it, so I was able to watch them play it as well. I’d tried to not make a big deal of the controller beforehand, but they had heard tell of the hype surrounding it so I was worried that they would be like “meh, it’s not that cool.” When Russell ran into the rain area, he exclaimed much like I did and handed the controller to Amy, who seemed equally impressed. Controller function aside, I had such a great time playing Astro’s Playroom with them. The game is filled with so much creative charm and love for PlayStation’s history. Many of the levels are made up of actual PS components, so as you explore you might see a PS1 controller port in a wall, or a PS2 memory card or HDD plate acting as a platform, or any number of cooling fans churning away in the environment. You also collect “Artifacts,” which are just consoles and accessories from past PS generations, and the level of fidelity and detail on these models was pretty amazing.

Each level is based on a different PlayStation generation, and the nostalgia triggered by hearing the startup sound of an old console is powerful. There are also little groups of Astro Bots in each level reenacting scenes from some of PlayStation’s most historic games, and spotting a new one at every turn was so exciting. Maybe all of this nostalgic magic affected me, because handing the controller back and forth with Amy and Russell truly made me feel like I was a teenager again, huddled in front of an exciting new PS1 game with my friends, taking turns playing and frequently interrupting with a “ooh, go there and check that thing!” or “maybe there’s something if you go around that corner there, you see it?” We raced around, explored the lovingly crafted worlds, got some trophies for being silly, and it was just a genuinely good time. For a free pack-in game, I think we were all thoroughly impressed.

I was very close to getting the platinum trophy for The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope on PS4, so I decided to see how the PS5 handled a backwards compatible game that had yet to be patched for optimization on PS5 by playing my final run of the story on my shiny new machine. I’d say the results were mixed. I had a hard time determining if the game looked better at first. I thought it did, slightly, but I couldn’t tell if that was a placebo affect because I wanted them to or thought they should. When I saw the first demon, however, I was certain that I could make out loads more detail in the character models. The demons looked very dark and shadowy on my PS4 Pro and I thought that might have been a design decision, but on the PS5 I could make out way more detail and finer features. The framerate was also noticeably improved in the PS5 version. It was especially apparent in segments where something was scrolling on screen, like the heartbeat sections. I could tell almost immediately because I had played through the game six or seven times on the PS4 just prior to getting my PS5, and I doubly confirmed it when I went back to the PS4 version. On the downside, the game crashed several times and even corrupted my save file when I was nearing the end of my run, which is why I ended up returning to playing it on the PS4.

PS4 version shown

Lastly, I am around eight or nine hours into Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the PS5 version. As usual, I’ll probably dedicate a whole blog post to this game later so I’ll save comments about the game as a game and just focus on how it looked and ran on the PS5. I can’t compare it to the PS4 version, obviously, but I have played the previous two AC games extensively, so I almost immediately noticed the improved framerate. Look, I have long been one of those people who love to say that I don’t see the big deal about 60fps. And, truthfully, I’d never been impressed with any of the 60fps videos I’d seen. Between these three games, though, I can see why people prefer it. It really is noticeable, so while it doesn’t magically make a game look better, it is a really nice bonus. In terms of fidelity, this game is unsurprisingly beautiful. At first, it didn’t seem like much of an improvement over Origins and Odyssey, though, because those were also notably gorgeous games. In those games, however, if you looked close enough you could pretty easily spot a muddy texture here or there, or some aliasing on a wave or blades of grass. I have yet to notice much of that in this game. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but the times that I’ve stopped Viking-ing to just appreciate the setting, I’ve been impressed with how crisp and smooth things look.

It’s been a week since launch day, and I have plans to try Grand Theft Auto Online, Spider-man: Miles Morales, and Bugsnax soon, but overall I am thrilled with my purchase. Despite all of the apparent doom and gloom about these consoles not feeling “next gen,” I am very happy and impressed with my PS5. I know it’s only been a week, but the little things still excite me. Moving through the menus feels fresh. Picking up the controller feels sweet. The startup sound is tinged with magic. Console launches are so rare and I am grateful each time I get to participate in one. The pundits can fret all they want over whether or not we “need” a new generation. We got one, and I am loving it.

That New Console Smell

The next generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles is arriving in just over a week, and I am finally allowing myself to feel the excitement. They’re really almost here. Wow. I was not able to secure an Xbox Series X preorder but I was lucky enough to snag one for the PlayStation 5, and I have obsessively been checking its status every day to make sure it doesn’t mysteriously get cancelled. Is that silly? Yes. Am I going to keep doing it until I get a notification that it has shipped? Also yes.

Getting caught up in the hype of a new console has me reflecting on my history with getting consoles at launch, so I wanted to write a retrospective before reliving the process with the PS5. The first consoles we had at my house (Atari 2600 and Balley Astrocade) weren’t technically mine, and the first two consoles that were mine (NES and SNES) were purchased months or years after launch. The first console I got at launch was the Nintendo 64, and I can already spot some similarities between my experience then and my experience now.

The level of hype surrounding the N64’s release can’t be understated. Although Sega had carved out a nice slice of the market for itself by the mid-90s, Nintendo had been the industry leader for over a decade and their development teams had made some of the best and most iconic games of the 80s and 90s.I had a subscription to Nintendo Power at the time, and for months they had been trumpeting the “Ultra 64,” a console that mainstream media outlets were covering as a “hot toy” going into the 1996 holiday season. A huge part of this hype, of course, was the transition from 2D to 3D graphics, and I am still struck by the fact that there has not been (and may never be) a shift in the gaming scene as big as this. Aside from the obvious gameplay implications, this shift made people look at video games as more “sophisticated” or “high tech.” Early video game consoles were meant to be taken seriously and were marketed at adults, hence the use of the word “computer” in many of the product names. In the 80s, Nintendo had marketed their products more in line with toys, and that became the norm for a decade (I would argue we’re still struggling with this misconception to this day).

With the N64, Sony PlayStation, and Sega Saturn, adults who had dismissed games as primitive and childish suddenly took notice, as these machines seemed capable of producing graphics and effects that seemed more realistic and allowed for more “mature” themes, in line with games that might be found on the PC. I’m babbling a bit, but my point is that I and other Nintendo fans were not the only ones making a big deal out of this system. Another component that contributed to this hype was the previews of Super Mario 64 that Nintendo had been circulating. When Toys “R” Us installed demo kiosks where you could play Mario 64 in their stores, I went every chance I could get. If no one had claimed the spot, I would jump on the alien tech-looking controller and lose my mind over how good it felt to run, jump, and punch goombas as Mario. If someone else was at the lone kiosk, I would skulk about, peeking around shelving units like a possessive creep, muttering “get your filthy, sticky mitts off my Mario” to myself. Okay, I didn’t actually do that, but I might as well have. After playing that demo, I wanted nothing more in the entire world than an N64 and Mario 64.

Growing up in a lower-middle class family meant that money was almost always tight. My sisters and I never got expensive gifts outside of birthdays and Christmas, and even then we would often have to plead our case for why we absolutely, unequivocally needed it, because we knew we’d inevitably be hit with questions like “why can’t you settle for this cheaper thing?” or “do you really need this? You’ll probably just get over it and be on to the next thing in a month.” With how many times I had to convince my parents that some expensive thing was worth the price, it’s no wonder I ended up in the field of rhetoric. Sometimes, if a thing was expensive enough, we had to use the nuclear option: suggest this gift would be our birthday and Christmas present, combined. Because the N64 was $199 and Mario 64 was sold separately for $60, I had to deploy this strategy, and given that my birthday is in mid-November (prime console launch time), the timeline worked out nicely.

Once my parents were sufficiently convinced of my dire need for this console, my dad took me to Toys “R” Us and the entire ride there I was asking questions like “what if they don’t have enough?’ and “what if someone grabs the last reservation slip (I think the terminology at the time was “reserving” a game and not “pre-ordering” it) right before we do?” They had plenty of slips for both the system and the game, but in the days leading up to release, I continued to pepper my dad with questions about what we would do if they we showed up and they said they had no record of our reservation, or if they simply said they had run out of units before we arrived (which is why I insisted we leave for the store as soon as my dad walked in from work). We did, and as we waited at the customer service cage where you picked up reservations, my anxiety grew. The woman there took our slip and disappeared into the back area. I was convinced she would return empty handed, or maybe with just the game and no console. She did not. She returned with a shiny, new N64 and a copy of Mario 64 and I was so excited I could hardly stand it. I gazed longingly at the game preview thumbnails on the back of the box in the car on the long drive home, and took an immense amount of joy in unboxing and setting it up and playing Mario 64 for hours that night. It’s been 24 years (almost exactly, as of last week) and I still have the console, the box it came in, and the receipt.

The next console I got at launch was a PlayStation 2, though I wasn’t lucky enough to get one on launch day in 2000. The demand for this console was, like the N64, massive, and it was months after launch before you could reliably find a PS2 box on store shelves. I worked in a record store at the time, so this was the first time I was able to buy a console myself, but every store I called at and after launch was sold out, always, and they never knew when they were getting more in. I became disenchanted at some point, feeling left out and like I was way out of the loop (even without social media, which would have only inflated that feeling greatly).

Then, one day in March, I was hanging out with my friend Ron. He was saying he read that Sony had made a big push and sent out a load of new units to retailers. I wasn’t great at saving money when I was 18 but I had just gotten paid, so I happened to have enough money to get the console and one game. Charged by this news, we decided to call up every retailer we knew of to find an elusive PS2. We called two Best Buys, two Circuit Citys, three Toys “R” Uses (pluralizing proper nouns is weird), Walmarts, K-Marts, Electronic Boutiques, Babbages’s, GameStops, and any other stores that we could think of that might carry them. With each call, we were told they were once again out of stock. A couple of them said some version of “we just sold our last one.” Our hopes dwindled. We began self-consolation. “Maybe they’ll get more next week.” “We should have known. We’ll get one eventually.” We ran out of stores to call. We tried to brainstorm more. “Isn’t there a Kay Bee Toys in the mall?” “Stratford?” “No, Woodfield Mall.” “Maybe?” We never went to Woodfield Mall because it was far and it was usually very crowded, so even if they had a console, I was sure it would be sold out. I called anyway.

“Hi, do you have the PS2?” “Yes, we do.” “Oh, uh – like, in stock? Right now?” “Yes, we have one left.” “…oh my god. Can you hold it for me?” “I’m sorry, we don’t hold things, but if you get here soon I’m sure you’ll get it.” I thanked him and hung up, and if my memory is not mistaken, Ron and I literally hugged and jumped up and down. That’s how I remember it so that’s just how it is now. We hopped in my car and sped (drove slightly, safely over the speed limit) to the mall. Think back to the N64 story. Can you guess what we were asking each other during the entire drive? “What if someone buys it?” “What if we see someone walking out with it in their hands as we walk up?” “What if they didn’t actually have any and he was mistaken?” Once again, however, my fears were dismissed when we arrived and saw the beautiful, minimalist blue box on a shelf behind the register. Something in my mind was still nervous, sure it was a display box, but I approached the man at the counter, asked for the PS2, and he turned and grabbed the box. He sounded like the same guy from the phone, and I remember him smiling at how obviously giddy Ron and I were to get this thing. I bought a copy of Quake III Revolution with it, and on the way to my house we stopped and got McDonald’s to celebrate. Getting fast food after a console purchase would become a tradition for us. We got back to my house and placed the hefty blue box on a pillow between us while we ate and talked about which games we were excited to play.

The Nintendo GameCube came out later that same year (2001), just two days after my birthday. My parents had been divorced for a while by then, so I rarely asked for big ticket items for birthdays or Christmas. I was working less at the record store at that point, and I had a bill to pay, so money wasn’t as readily available as when I splurged on a PS2. I really wanted a GameCube, though. I loved my PS2 but that magic Nintendo nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and I was definitely caught up in the hype around “Project Dolphin,” as it was once known. Nintendo threw a prerelease “party” (really just a showcase) in Chicago, and Ron and I somehow got tickets to go. It was in a very shady part of the city, and we got lost and were pretty sure drug dealers tried to approach our car to sell us something before we sped away. When we made it to the event, there were cosplayers, Stuff Magazine staff handing out swag, and lots of games. We tried out Super Monkey Ball, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, Eternal Darkness, and more. I still have some of the swag from that event.

As the GameCube’s release neared, I grew sad at the idea that I might not have the money to afford it. Or, if I could, I’d have to wait at least 2-4 weeks after I bought it to afford a game or two. I decided to ask my mom to split the cost with me, for my birthday. I was surprised when she agreed, but I was still nervous that I wouldn’t be able to get one because stores would be sold out. Because, of course I was. And a few stores were, indeed, sold out, but I was able to find one at a Target near my house. I really wanted a black version, the alternate to the main color it launched with, purple, but they only had one purple console left. Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, so I bought my little purple “l(a)unch box” on my way to work at the record store. I called Ron, who lived just a few blocks from the shop, and he rushed over to check it out and hang out with me. We got fast food to celebrate and I went to our neighboring store, Microplay, and bought Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and Super Monkey Ball. We ate, marveled at how small the discs were, and talked about what the next Zelda or Mario game might be like.

The Nintendo Wii was yet another console released around my birthday, and its 2006 launch is probably my favorite and most eventful. As you might have noticed, if you’ve read this far, I have never camped out for a console. I’ve either preordered or gotten lucky at or around launch. I realized this before the Wii’s launch and wanted to change this sad fact. Camping out sounded so fun! Also, most stores weren’t offering preorders for the Wii. Still, at the time, most people I told I was going to do this thought I was an idiot. A sad, nerdy idiot who was going to wait outside for hours, all for a console that no one wanted.

“What!?” I hear you say in dramatic exasperation. “But the Wii sold millions! Everyone wanted it!” First of all, please lower your voice, you are causing a scene. Second of all, the buzz around the Wii before launch was mostly very negative or, at best, highly skeptical. The Xbox 360 and PS3 promised high definition graphics, multimedia capability, and robust online systems. The Wii was far less powerful and did less, and if you read gaming websites, listened to early gaming podcasts, or checked in on various blogs or message boards, people did not have high hopes for the Wii. As they seemingly have since the days of the N64, people wondered aloud if this would be Nintendo’s last console release. Many seemed sure the Wii would fail with Nintendo’s “blue ocean” strategy failing to find the broad audience that they had intended it to.

We know how it all turned out, of course. Within just a couple of weeks, those same people were asking me how to get a Wii because they’d heard it was the hot Christmas “toy” in 2006. But those people did get in my head, and I wondered if lining up for the Wii the evening prior was silly. Would I be the only person in line? Would I be waiting for hours for no reason? Well, to alleviate that, I recruited our old friend Ron, who jumped at the chance to also get a Wii at launch. I lived in Alabama at the time, so we made plans for me to drive up the day before release and drive by the local Target that evening. If people were in line, we’d wait. If not, we’d come back later.

The drive from Montgomery, AL to Streamwood, IL takes about 12 or 13 hours, which I did without sleep. I arrived around 6pm, if I remember correctly, and after greeting his parents and unloading my luggage, Ron and I decided to drive to Target. The more we had talked about it, the more certain we were that there probably wouldn’t be anyone in line at that time, so we didn’t bring any equipment or anything. We pulled up and saw six people, clearly in line for the Wii. We were stunned and hurried back to his house to get everything we might need for a 12 hour campout. We were in a panicked rush because we were convinced 30 more people would show up in the fifteen minutes it took us to grab stuff and get back to the store, so we just grabbed some basics – a couple of blankets, some drinks, and some snacks. When we returned, no one else had jumped in line, so we set up camp as numbers six and seven. It may not come as a surprise, but throughout the night we continually wondered how many units the store would get and worried that it would, of course, be just five. Let me share a picture of the store from Google Street View:

That’s exactly where we lined up. See that low, concrete curb in front of the trees? We thought that would be an okay place to sit. For twelve hours. In a Midwestern November. After our asses began to harden into cubes of pure ass-ice, we had to make a change, so Ron ran home and got us sleeping bags and camping chairs, which helped. The temperature was still hovering around freezing, but we distracted ourselves by making separate runs inside the store, tossing a football around (until I jammed one of my frozen fingers), watching Jackass Number Two on Ron’s laptop, and getting food from the McDonald’s across the street. Our friend Gari also stopped by with more fast food, which was a nice distraction. But the night moved fairly quickly until around 1am. An hour later, Ron suggested we take turns napping in the car to pass the time, so I agreed and went first, at 2:30. I awoke at 4am to a call from Ron, letting me know it had started sleeting. I came out and Ron went in. It was so cold. Even with layers of clothing, a coat, a sleeping bag, and a hat and gloves, I was freezing. In the 1UP.com blog post I wrote about it at the time, I said “The snow was big and wet, although it wasn’t sticking to anything for too long. I pulled the sleeping bag up around me as much as I could, and pulled my hat down as far as it would go. It was still cold. Mainly because the cold snow/water on my sleeping bag would touch my neck or face every now and then, sending chills throughout my body.”

That’s me, far right and freezing.

I also tracked the number of people in line in that blog post, and reported that for most of the night there were 15 of us in line. By the time Ron woke up (and made another McDonald’s run), at 5:30am, there were around 25-30, at 6:45, around 35, and by 7am (when store employees came out to give us tickets and explain the situation) there were 45 or more people. The store director that came out said they only had 39 consoles, so several people (and the people that arrived later to try and just walk in and buy one) were turned away. After we got our tickets at 7, we were free to leave and come back at 8, when the store opened, so we packed up our stuff and dropped it off at Ron’s house before coming back to wait in the car. We were in and out in less than ten minutes once the store opened.

Ron picked up The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Excite Truck, and Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. I picked up Twilight Princess and Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Once we had our hard-earned loot, we hit up a Wendy’s for the traditional celebration meal. I specifically remember getting a vanilla Frosty, which was a new thing at the time. Ron had sung its praises but I’d never been willing to try it because, uh, chocolate, duh. But to mark the occasion, I figured getting a vanilla Frosty to commemorate our shiny, vanilla-colored consoles was appropriate. We headed back to Ron’s place, enjoyed our feast, unpacked our systems, made our Miis, and then tried out each game. We were weirdly excited by the blue glow of the disc slot. I was in the first 20 or so minutes of Twilight Princess when I completely crashed. It was a long, cold, glorious night.

It wasn’t until the PlayStation 4, in November of 2013, that I bought another console at launch (the day before my birthday, of course). This experience wasn’t as exciting or eventful, in part because I preordered it as soon as anyone had the chance to do so, and didn’t have anyone to share the experience with at the time. I received the package on the day it was released, set it up, was impressed by both the new controller and the interface, spent a lot of time checking out the livestream apps (I think it was Twitch and… something with a D), and tried out Killzone Shadow Fall and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

Four years later, in March 2017, I once again decided to camp out for a console. This time: the Nintendo Switch. The Switch and the Wii’s launches were similar in that the consoles were so different than what many had expected that the hype around them was mixed, at best. Because of this, I had no idea what to expect in terms of a line, but when I drove by my local Target at 9pm the night before release, no one was lined up, so I went home and took a short nap. I woke up at 11pm and packed up what I thought I might need for the night: a camping chair, a phone charging thingy, a book, and a blanket. It was March but still cold, so I prepared for freezing temperatures. I drove to Walmart at 11:30pm for snacks, because they are open 24 hours, and as I was walking in it dawned on me that they might be selling the Switch at midnight. Sure enough, I made my way to the back of the store to find a pretty lengthy line. I got in it and waited the half hour, only to be three people short of getting one. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, because I had planned on camping out anyway. I got my snacks and drinks and headed to Target. I was the only person there.

I was able to take plenty of pictures with my phone, and many of them have captions because I sent them to friends on Snapchat. One of these captions informs me that it got down to at least 20 degrees, and I do remember it being very cold most of the night. I spent some time in my car, but because random overnight Target employees kept showing up and making me think they were going to steal my coveted first (and only) spot in line, I spent most of my time outside. I read Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, played Pokemon GO (the Target was a PokeStop!), and for the first time ever, peed in a fast food cup (I had gotten food on my way from Walmart to Target). I wasn’t proud of it, but I did what I had to. When I first decided to try sitting in my car to warm up, I also set up my chair like a scarecrow to ward off the car that drove by every hour or so. It wasn’t until around 5am that someone else showed up: a young woman and her mother. She was getting the Switch for her boyfriend, as a surprise. We talked for a bit, which was nice. At around 6, other people started showing up. There was a younger guy who was, if I remember correctly, an NIU student, and a guy that was older than me. We chatted as a group about classic Nintendo games, what games we’d like to see on the Switch, and then just video games in general.

Many more people showed up right before 7am, when they handed out tickets (as they had for the Wii). I think I estimated there to be around 25, at the time, and I want to say the store got like 22 or 23 units. I was originally planning on getting the black version, but when the store director came out to distribute tickets he said they only had like seven of the blue and red versions, so I decided to get that one on a whim, heh. With the console, I picked up 1-2-Switch, a pro controller, and the special edition of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I got celebratory McDonald’s on the way home, then unpacked everything and chronicled it with pictures.

I camped out at the same Target with my friend Tab for the SNES Mini console, but I don’t know if that counts and I’m sure this is already too long, so I will spare you the details. I’ll just say that it was nice to have Tab there, it was cold (again), and we were first and second in line.

I won’t have the opportunity to camp out for the new consoles. I have a preorder for the PS5 and my local stores have said they are not allowing camping due to COVID. There is a new angle of anxiety in getting consoles now, with the mad scramble to beat fans, bots, and scalpers to a preorder click before the online orders disappear. It’s less taxing than camping out in the cold, but it’s also less fun, and it feels less fair. Maybe fair isn’t the right word. But competing with just the people in my area for a couple dozen units seems easier to navigate than competing with thousands of faceless strangers across the internet. I missed out on an Xbox Series X preorder and have been refreshing retails sites every day since, with no luck. I’ll have to try on launch day, but I’m already expecting to be disappointed.

Reflecting on my history with console launches has revealed a couple of patterns to me. One, not surprisingly, is anxiety. Whether it was securing a preorder and then worrying it wouldn’t be honored, or camping outside a store and then worrying that they would run out or someone would cut in line and get your console before you, there has always been a level of concern that (I think) shows how much these consoles mean to me. And it’s something that hasn’t gone away. That PS5 preorder I mentioned? I check almost every single day to make sure Target hasn’t canceled it. Why would they? I don’t know! But I worry. The other pattern is in the rituals that come with the post-victory glow. Getting something delicious to eat. Staring at the shiny new box as I (or we) eat said deliciousness. Gently (probably too gently) unboxing the unit and marveling at its sleek design. Taking a moment to appreciate that new console smell. This is a long post and I’ve gone over what seem like a lot of launches, but if you look at their release years, these things don’t happen very often. They are rarities, and when they generate magical memories, they become important parts of our identities as gamers. That is why I wanted to chronicle my journey here, and why I am looking forward to the next generation and many more to come.

Phasmophobia and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Ghosts

It’s spooooooky season! I hope you heard that in a sufficiently spooky voice in your head. I’d say you can imagine my voice but you probably don’t know what I sound like, unless you know me (hi, Amy!). Just trust me: I sound very spooky. Okay, no, I don’t, but you don’t have to know that. What was I talking about again? Oh, right, it’s spooky season and I’ve been celebrating with horror movies and video games all month long. In addition to finishing Days Gone, I’ve been playing Castlevania from the Castlevania Anniversary Collection and, more to the point of this post, a little Steam early access game called Phasmophobia.

Phasmophobia is a 1-4 player co-op game where you and your team investigate an empty house to figure out what kind of ghost has been causing a ruckus. Yes, I said a ruckus. A ghostly ruckus. There are different kinds of ghosts, like poltergeists, demons, spirits, and yurei, and each has different strengths, weaknesses, and clues that they leave behind. You have several tools that “real” ghost hunters use, like EMF readers, thermometers, UV flashlights, and more, and you use these tools to detect the traces unique to each ghost. You might catch a spooky handprint on a window with the UV flashlight, freezing temperatures with the thermometer, or some demonic scrawls in a spirit book you left on the floor of the room you suspect is the specter’s “spot.” Once you collect three clues, you can narrow down which ghost you’re dealing with and get the fuck out of there.

And you will want to get the fuck out of there, because while the ghost may be harmless when you first arrive, after you and your team poke around too much, calling the ghost’s name or setting up gear, it gets angry. It might simply try and spook you by knocking something off a shelf, making the lights flicker, or lightly tapping a key on the family piano. Eventually, however, it will enter a “hunting phase,” where your flashlights will begin to flip out, all external doors will slam and lock, and the ghost will search high and low for a victim. You communicate with team members via walkie talkie, so if a team member dies you might not even know it unless they don’t respond to your calls or you come across their dead, sometimes twisted corpse. I have been playing with my friends Tab and Ron, and here is an example of Tab’s corpse:

What’s that? Are they looking under the car for some keys they dropped? No. They are dead, folded in half by a ghost. I have played a lot of horror games in my time (*strokes long, white beard, indicative of great age and eternal wisdom*), but I have honestly never been so scared playing a game. Okay, maybe that one time, but I was a child. I am a full grown man now (in body, anyway). I served in the military for six years, trained briefly with Marines on a deployment to the Middle East, and live on my own in a very old and creepy house – and yet, when I am alone in a dark room, holding a small glowing radio that’s hissing static, and I whisper “where are you?” only to hear the radio immediately chirp “behind,” followed by a loud hiss whooshing by my ears, I get chills and almost projectile vomit from fear. Okay, the second part was an exaggeration, but this is legitimately the first game to give me chills. Mr. X? Psh. Pyramid Head? *yawn* Betty Brown, formerly of the Ridgeview Road House? *shudder*

At the time of this writing, I have played this game for 61 hours, and while we’ve certainly gotten better at the game and are less scared, we are still very often scared out of our wits. We strut in bravely, thermometers and flashlights in hand, and as soon as we hear a low gurgle accompanied by heavy footsteps, we run as fast as our slow, janky legs will carry us. The game is janky and unfinished, but it’s still a blast to play with friends. And more than almost any other game, I really do feel like friends are necessary for this. Can you play by yourself? Yes. I tried just such a thing, early on, before I knew the stench of my own solitary fear (I’m not even kidding, my sweat seriously stinks when I play this game. My gym sweat? Not bad! Phasmophobia sweat? Like a skunk that shit the bed. Ladies, I am available *kissie emoji*).

It takes a long time to make money at first in this game, so after a play session with Tab, I decided I would try a solo run. I gave myself an actual pep talk before I went in. “It’s just a game. You won’t lose anything if you die. You’re not risking anything. You don’t even believe in ghosts! Just do it. It’s. Just. A. Game.” So I stupidly went in this dark, empty house, all by my dumbass self, and after about two minutes I was in a darkened laundry room. It was cold so I knew the ghost was there. I needed to set up some equipment before I left. I would just make this one trip, I told myself. It’ll be quick. I found a shelf to place a remote video camera and began positioning it when the door to the room slammed and I heard a very loud “HHAAAHHH” move right through me. My heart leapt through my fucking chest, I almost choked, and I straight up closed Steam. Nope.

Let me talk you through a few pictures. First up is a ghost that killed me, stalking Ron. When you’re killed, you return as a spectral form, though you can’t do all the fun stuff that the evil ghost can. You can basically just follow your friends around and ask eerily “why didn’t you save me?” even though they can’t hear you. In this game, I died and watched Ron stand outside the front door, trying to call in and get the ghost to respond. He made the mistake of stepping just a smidge over the threshold, though, and the ghost seized its chance, shutting the door behind him and immediately entering its hunting phase. Ron couldn’t see the ghost but he could hear its heavy boots and gross, ghosty throat gurgles behind him. I, however, could see the whole thing. The ghost, an old man, jaw broken and half hanging from his face, wielded a machete and chased Ron to another room, where Ron was actually lucky to escape.

I don’t have a lot of great screenshots of ghosts because when they do appear as visible in the game, there is a good chance you are either about to die or you just shit your proverbial pants and the last thing on your mind is reaching over and hitting fn>F12. We were determined to get a picture of the ghost once, though, so we hatched a plan. Closets, we deduced, are safe spaces. If you hide in a closet the ghosts don’t seem to kill you, no matter how angry they get. So, in one house, Tab hid in one closet while Ron monitored the ghost’s location from the team van. I opened a different closet near Tab’s so that I could run in and hide once I snapped a pic of the ghost, then I waited in the hallway, camera in hand, as Tab spoke to the ghost to anger it. We were both nervous and jumpy. Finally we saw lights flash and I heard the telltale ghost sounds, but I didn’t see the ghost so I freaked out and ran for the closet. Immediately I knew my mistake. I saw it before I even stepped in. The ghost was in the closet. In leaving the door ajar, I apparently left it wide open for ghostly tenants to hop in and scare the ever-loving shit out of me. As you can see from the picture in the top right, I did get the photo, though.

This next picture was taken tonight. Ron and I were playing, and we narrowed the ghost’s room down to either a bedroom or the adjoining bathroom. We had set up some equipment but we didn’t have much in the way of evidence. We gingerly wandered back into the room to look for stray fingerprints or a polite “DIE DIE DIE” written in the spirit book. We entered and as soon as I spun around the lights went out and we heard ol’ groany. Our characters’ hearts began thumping loudly (as they do when a ghost is very close), and without thinking I snapped a picture, hoping to catch a glimpse of something before my head was twisted around the wrong way. We hauled ass and made it out alive, but check out the shot I caught:

One of our favorite things to do now is play “roulette.” We need a catchier name for it. Ghost roulette? Spectral roulette? Roulettemeoutofhererightnow? We’ll figure it out. Anyway, this is a game I suggested a few days ago and we’ve played it twice so far. The first time we played, we located the ghost before starting, but it’s not necessary and we didn’t do it the second time. Basically, we only bring in photo cameras and maybe a flashlight to toss on the floor so we know when the ghost is hunting. We pick a room, each stand in a different corner, then take turns saying things to the ghost. Last person standing wins. Even though it’s more predictable than a normal round, it’s still very scary. I have also suggested we play a version where we take turns running through the house (in the front door and out the back), calling the ghost’s name the entire time. If the back door locks and you can somehow escape the ghost, you get to try again. I also think it would be fun to each stand in a separate room when we play roulette and only say something once every full minute. That way, if one of us died it would be at least three full minutes before the others realized it (because the dead person wouldn’t say their line), and three minutes is more than enough time for a ghost to start a second hunt.

Okay, I think I’ve babbled on enough about this game, but it was a very fun and unexpected surprise, and the absolute perfect game for the Halloween season. I’m sure our interest will drop off eventually, but I’m already looking forward to our next session, and I can’t wait to check the game out once it gets out of early access and the developers have implemented all of the features they’re planning. Until then, I’ll just be here, in the dark, speaking in a hoarse whisper into my glowing hiss box: “Where are you?” “Are you a girl?” “Can I help?” “Are you single?”

Of X-Wings and Zombie Things

With new consoles and big games on the horizon, I’m feeling an urge to write about the games I’m playing before I end up with a big, multi-game post again. I want to chronicle my PS5 launch experience, and so many big games like Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are claiming space in my brain, so I want to share my thoughts on the two games I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently: Star Wars: Squadrons and Days Gone.

Star Wars: Squadrons

Although I missed out on the X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter game(s), I have mostly enjoyed the space combat components of many of the Star Wars games I’ve played. It’s not exactly “space,” but one of my fondest Star Wars video game memories is playing the Hoth level of Shadows of the Empire over and over and over again, and I played the hell out of the Rogue Squadron games. So I was all in when the trailer dropped earlier this summer, and I couldn’t believe the game was going to be out so soon after the announcement. And at $40? It seemed too good to be true! “Wait,” I thought. “It really does seem too good to be true.” And thus began the doubt. Was it going to be too short? Too niche? Too technical and inaccessible? I was nervous.

Well, as a wise little alien once said, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” That alien was Yoda and, as usual, he was wrong. My fears were not only unfounded, they certainly did not lead to suffering. I really love Squadrons and am still playing it when I have time. The gameplay is not nearly as dense and technical as I thought it might be. It’s not as loose and arcade-y as most of the other Star Wars flight experiences, sure, but I actually prefer this type of flying. I think I’ve complained about this before, but I dislike flight games where you control a point out in front of your craft. As much as I loved the Rogue Squadron games, they controlled like that. When you tilt your controller in these games, the “nose” of your craft points in that direction. It feels unrealistic and unsatisfying to me. I much prefer games where you are controlling a point in the center of the craft. This allows for more realistic turns and you can do an actual barrel roll, as opposed to what would essentially be a corkscrew.

So, for me, that was the biggest win for this game: it feels good to play. Do I have to flip switches and monitor gauges? Yes, but there aren’t that many and it was very easy to pick up. It feels so cool to divert power to engines to increase the speed of my X-Wing toward a Star Destroyer, switch to weapons systems to launch a volley of blasts toward a shielding subsystem, then immediately cut to shields to make an escape. Well, try to make an escape. I’m often so determined to do as much damage as I can that I end up being destroyed before I can get safely away, heh. I was also a little nervous about the first-person perspective, as I usually prefer seeing the ship I’m flying, but I ended up really liking that, too. Again, my fears were unfounded. While I would like some kind of replay feature, where you see your ship and all the cool stuff you did from a third person perspective (like in the Ace Combat series), I found myself enjoying the cockpit view very much. Another one of my favorite experiences in the game is lining up a perfect shot on an enemy, unloading, and then bursting through the fiery remnants. I doubt it would be so thrilling in third person.

Squadrons isn’t quite as pretty as Star Wars Battlefront II, and it certainly doesn’t offer as much variety in terms of locales and ships, but there were still plenty of times I found myself in awe, scraping the hull of a cruiser with my TIE Fighter or rounding an asteroid to see a shattered Star Destroyer with beams of the nearest star cutting through my cockpit window. I’ve completed the story and played a handful of fleet battles, but I haven’t had as much time as I’d like with this game. With the new consoles, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla coming soon, I don’t know when I’ll even have time to return to it. But I really liked it and I can’t wait to get back to it at some point.

Days Gone

One of the reasons I haven’t had as much time to play Squadrons is because I started Days Gone earlier this month, and I have been trying to knock it out before November hits. It’s a much bigger game than I expected, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It had a lot of negative press when it came out, but as we know by this point, often the negative (or positive) hype around a game has little to do with any given person’s enjoyment of said game. Gaming culture can be toxic, and tainting a game’s reception because of some predisposed perception of it (or its developers), without having played it, is just one example of that toxicity. It’s certainly not a perfect game, and seemingly could have used a bit more polish, but overall I am having a lot of fun with it.

Part of my enjoyment might be coming from my love of zombie games in general, and this game has elements of Left 4 Dead, Dead Island, and I’d argue there’s even a little Resident Evil influence in there. All of that zombie goodness takes place in an open world where you help to build up outposts, earn money to improve your motorcycle (mount), and go out on exploratory missions and tasks. This is My Type of Game™. I didn’t really think I’d be too into the idea of a motorcycle as a mode of transportation, but once I was able to start modding and customizing my bike, I was in. Throw in a custom Horizon Zero Dawn paint job and I was soon dreaming of how to quickly gain experience to unlock even better mods. I like games that have horses but to be honest, I rarely use them. I typically prefer to explore on foot. Throw in the fact that a loud motorcycle would attract the terrifying zombie hordes and I fully expected to leave my bike behind 90% of the time. Nope. I am almost never without my bike.

“Dude, where’s my bike?”

Speaking of the hordes, they aren’t quite as massive as I was expecting, but they are about as terrifying. Given the damage that just a few infected can do if they get to you, I knew I would never survive a close encounter with a few dozen or more of the rabid sonsabitches. So I steered very clear whenever I caught a glimpse of one. And then I found my first cave in the game, and if you’ve ever played a video game you know that caves are Where It’s At. There had to be something good in there. So I crouched low and started sneaking in, casting my flashlight about, watching for spookies. I got pretty deep before turning a corner and swinging my light toward a huddled mass of heaving infected, hunched and breathing heavy. They whipped their collective heads toward me and it was like that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest where Jack Sparrow is running from the big group of cannibals. I busted ass out of the cave and hopped on my bike quicker than you can say I am Legend: The Video Game. Later, when I was slightly more proficient in combat, I found a NERO camp under a railroad bridge. NERO camps are exciting because once you power them up and get inside, an injector that permanently increases a stat awaits. So I hopped off my bike and got to work on finding gas for the generator when I spotted a horde… above me, in a car of the train stopped on the bridge. I backed away slowly, but then I noticed there were explosive barrels, crates, and gas cans placed at seemingly strategic places around the camp. Could I take out a horde this early? I could just time my shots and take out a few chunks, then clean up the rest… yes, I thought, and decided to go for it. I positioned myself in the road below, shot a few of them to get their attention, and as they spilled out of the car, dozens of arms and legs clamoring over each other, I lined up a shot with a gas truck. I pulled the trigger. *Click*. *Ting*. Nothing. I hit it but it didn’t explode. Uh. Uhhh. They’re moving so fast, they’re going to get *click* I shot again. *BOOM* Huge explosion. But I was already jumping on my bike. I was two seconds too late with the second shot. The truck took out a handful, but the rest were already on me. I managed to get away but not without a few swipes to my bike.

I did take a horde out, eventually. I found one on the edge of a swamp and it seemed smaller than the others. I decided to see if I could thin its numbers with explosives, then run away and come back with more. I parked my bike facing away, then threw two Molotovs and two pipe bombs before the horde could react. It was perfect. Each pipe bomb took out 4-5, and the Molotovs looked like they got 2-4 each. I zoomed a short distance away on my bike as they chased me, but they quickly gave up and started ambling back to their original spot. I returned and did the same thing, and when I rode away this time I made sure to guide the stragglers a little farther than the core. When the core turned back I took out the stragglers with silenced guns, then went back to the very small remaining core and was able to just melee them. I don’t imagine I’ll get that lucky with the rest of them, but I felt pretty accomplished with the 45+ ears I’d collected.

It’s these types of events that really win me over in open world games. The outpost building, bike modding, and side quests mentioned earlier are key, too, but when there is enough freedom and flexibility in a world to allow for unique approaches to solving problems, I am 100% there for it. I love that if me and ten of my friends played this game (lol I don’t have ten friends – hi, Amy!), we would all probably have very different stories about taking down our first horde. I’m not finished with the story yet, but I think I’m pretty far. The story has been pretty decent, but even if they completely botch the landing, I can safely say that I enjoyed my time with the game and am looking forward to finishing every side quest, collectible, and mission. And then it will be… Days Done. Get it? Instead of Gone? Done? Okay, I’m out.

Paper Mario (and More-io)

The dawn of the next generation of consoles is upon us. Last week, the PlayStation 5 preorders went up, this week it was the Xbox Series X/S. I was lucky enough to secure a PS5, but I haven’t had any luck getting a Series X. I was late in trying for that one, though. For the PS5, I suspected Sony would pull another “and preorders are open now” deal, like they did last generation, so after their Showcase Event I and several of my gaming scholar friends formed an alliance to scour the various retail sites for any sign of a preorder opportunity. After the event, Sony said that preorders would begin “tomorrow,” but having been present for a few modern console launches, I had my doubts, and when rumors emerged that some retailers would open preorders that day, the alliance went into action, refreshing page after page. About an hour after the event, I noticed Target’s PS5 landing page changed to a less marketing-oriented page to one where you could preorder PS5 games. I knew that meant something was about to happen, and my guess paid off. Within minutes the preorder link went up. As I was excitedly typing my payment information in, I used Siri to call one friend and tell them the link was live, then when I submitted my order, I sent a link to the rest of the alliance. All but one of us got one. It was an exciting victory. I only decided on a whim to get an Xbox Series X, so I was hours late in trying for one of those preorders. I ran into some of the widely reported issues where I was able to get one in my cart on the Best Buy site but then it would empty my cart and say “whoops,” basically. And Target almost let me get one as well, a few times. But alas, I have been refreshing all of the main sites every now and then since yesterday and have had no luck. It’s cool. It was going to be a Christmas present to myself, so as long as I can get one before then I’ll be fine.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars

As close as the next gen is, we won’t be there for another month and a half, so let me continue my periodic rambling about what I’m playing in the now. Did I just say “in the now”? Ugh. I want to punch myself in the face. Speaking of punching myself in the face, I recently got Super Mario 3D All-Stars and tried a bit of Super Mario 64 for the first time in… too many years. The last time I played it was probably around the time the game came out. Let’s not do the math because my birthday is coming up and I’m old. Keeping with the theme of feeling old, my experience with this port (which was surprisingly crisp and good looking) highlighted how kind the fuzzy filter of nostalgia is. In my memory, the controls in Mario 64 were so smooth, responsive, and precise. I remember feeling so amazed at tilting the joystick forward just slightly and Mario tiptoeing, or spinning it in circles and watching him respond in exactly the same motion.

Now, in my defense, at the time all of that was pretty groundbreaking. It felt precise and responsive compared to the few 3D games I’d played. Now? Oof. I mean, it’s not at all terrible. But between the less-than-perfect feeling movement and the terrible camera (which, again, what did we have to compare it to at the time?), it was kind of painful revisiting this gem. I can’t wait to play Super Mario Sunshine, because I loved that game when it came out and expect it to feel much better, but I think I’ll tuck Mario 64 back into the dusty, warm recesses of my memory and leave it at that.

Paper Mario: The Origami King

Speaking of Mario, I finally did the thing! I played a Paper Mario game at launch! I spent over 50 hours playing Paper Mario: The Origami King and I loved most of those hours. [some spoilers ahead] The biggest draws of the series for me have always been the bright, cute art style and character/environments, witty writing and humor, and generally just seeing familiar Mario characters in big narratives where they really get the chance to shine. Those elements were all here, even if there wasn’t as much papery Peach goodness as I’d have liked. Kamek was a standout in this entry and had some of the best lines, and I loved Bowser’s role in this one as well. Something I realized with this entry: Mario is the character given the least amount of personality in these games. The designers seem to get the chance to expand almost every other character’s personality, including minions like Bob-ombs. Mario is reduced to a silent protagonist, probably because of the series’ JRPG roots.

Much has been made of the combat system, and I have mixed feeling about it. Some people seem to love it, some people seem to hate it. I thought I liked it more than I’d expected to, until I encountered some of the more difficult combat puzzles later in the game. I was so excited when I got to the gameshow level… until I realized you essentially had to solve combat puzzles to win points. There were also some boss fights that had particularly frustrating aspects related to the puzzle grid. It wasn’t bad enough to ruin the game for me, and most encounters were either fun or just passable. I would just absolutely love a return to party-based, RPG-like combat. We won’t see another Paper Mario game for some time now, I guess, but I’ll have my fingers crossed anyway.

I am Setsuna

Another game I’ve recently spent a significant time with is I am Setsuna, a game that I’d heard several versions of “if you like Chrono Trigger, you’ll like this game” about. I’ve heard that before, many times, and I’ve almost always been let down. I am Setsuna is not so close that you’d mistake it for a cousin, but it’s definitely the most Chrono Trigger­-y RPG I’ve played, from the active-time battle system to the mysterious scythe-wielding enemy/friend, to the dual and triple tech-likes, and more. One of the things I really liked about this game was how simple and direct it was. Areas were small and contained, you could virtually never get lost, yet with the inclusion of an overworld it felt like you were traveling over vast distances, like the JRPGs of old. I didn’t have to think very much while playing this game, and while that might be a complaint for some other RPGs, I welcomed it here. This felt like a short(ish), simple(ish), straightforward old school RPG. A proverbial cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream and marshmallows. A sweet reminder of simpler times.

Hi, Amy!

Things that were not so sweet, though: the archaic save system. Yes, okay, I get it: there was a real dedication to being old school here. But when you spend two hours grinding and unwittingly wander into a new enemy that wipes you out in two turns, and you’ve lost two hours of your life because of that dedication to old school design, you begin to see why autosaves are actually pretty great. I also did not love the character models. The character designs were great (in their avatars), and I absolutely loved the environment art. Some sections literally looked like paintings. But then to contrast that with chibi-like characters with oversized heads and hands and absolutely no feet? Blech. Hrk. Other gagging sounds. It was something I hated about the original Final Fantasy VII, and while it’s not quite as bad here, it still made my skin crawl. You may be Setsuna but you need to put Some-shoes-on your feet. Wait, that didn’t work. If you say it out loud it works better. Except they don’t have feet to put the shoes on… you know what? Let’s move on.

Return of the Obra Dinn

I have been so excited to get this game since I saw the first trailer. The art style, reminiscent of very old school PC games, is so unique and cool that I was almost all-in for that reason alone. When you add the premise – that you are an investigator tasked with exploring a ghost ship to determine the identity and cause of death of every former passenger – I was sold. I’ve played about eight hours at this point but I think I’m going to put it aside. It’s not that I don’t like it. I think it’s rad and it definitely allows you to do the detective work without holding your hand or giving you much help. That means that it requires patience, though, which I don’t have much of at the moment. When you come across a new corpse (or some indicator of a former corpse), you get to see a 3D model/flashback of that character’s death. From this snapshot and any other clues you might have gathered, you have to determine the person’s name, cause of death, and (if applicable) killer. It’s rarely obvious, and in most cases you have to recall the smallest of details that were in no way highlighted in a different memory you may have viewed hours ago. If you’re looking for a challenge and the reward that comes with truly solving some mysteries on your own, that complicated process is really cool. When you have a stack of games that you’re trying to catch up on before the next generation of consoles lands, it can be a bit anxiety inducing. So I would definitely recommend it to people, and I will almost certainly go back to it someday, but for now I think I’m going to move on to some spooky games (like Days Gone and some classic Castlevania games) to celebrate the upcoming Halloween season.

End of Summer Snippets

Well, the nights are getting cooler, the days are getting shorter, and I can already smell the scent of pumpkin spice on the veritable breeze that is social media bandwagoning. I love summer and will be sad to see it go, but I am trying to look forward to the nice things about fall. The beautiful autumnal leaves, the opportunity to make various chilies and stews, and I will, of course, once again embrace the spooky majesty that is Halloween by attempting to watch a horror movie every day in October and playing various scary games (I just picked up the Castlevania Anniversary Collection on PS4, as a matter of fact). I’m getting ahead of myself, though, as this blog is a look back, not forward. I’ve spent a ton of time with some big games this year, like Yakuza 0, Persona 5 Royal, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, so with this last month I’ve mostly been poking around and dabbling with shorter games. As has become habit, I wanted to share my thoughts on what I’ve been playing before the list grows longer than I can manage. Some [SPOILERS] throughout, if you care.

Secret Little Haven

I’ve professed my love for the Emily is Away games, and apparently I have a thing for throwback Internet/instant messenger games because I found this game to scratch that same nostalgic itch. The narrative unfolds through instant messenger chats, like the Emily games, but unlike those games Secret Little Haven is more firmly rooted in what seems to me to be the memoir genre. Both games’ developers would, I imagine, point to real life experiences from their past as influences for their games, but while the Emily games center on a more ‘universal’ experience of online flirting/romance, Haven is more narrow, centered on a young trans girl exploring identity through pop culture and finding community in online spaces. So, while I enjoyed the game on a subjective level, I also think it’s an important and interesting game to look at when considering games as a unique medium for memoir or just a rare example of a trans narrative in games. Also, the protagonist finds personal inspiration in a character from what appears to be a fictional version of Sailor Moon, which made me want to see/hear/read/play more stories of people discovering important aspects of their personalities through pop culture characters. I feel like that’s something that’s downplayed or thought of as ‘childish,’ but I have to imagine it’s more common than people let on.

Hatoful Boyfriend

This game started out as a joke Flash game, and it doesn’t seem to have evolved much beyond that. That’s not really a harsh criticism, because I don’t think the game was ever meant to be some deep, highly polished masterpiece, but it’s hard to avoid commentary on its bare-bones presentation. It was very weird and did show some cleverness in its awareness of the tropes in the visual novel genre, though. I only played through one ending and chose to pursue Nageki, the melancholy mourning dove.

Arcade Spirits

This game tapped directly into a very nerdy vein for me. I mean, it’s a dating sim about gaming. Uh, yes, please. The writing and characters were very charming and the story was far more involved and lengthy than I’d expected. I did wish there were more in the way of illustrations/animations (particularly in terms of player character design), but as an indie game I don’t exactly hold it against the devs. The writing was the highlight, anyway. Still, I loved these characters and this world so I would kill for Dream Daddy levels of art production. It was hard to ultimately determine how much impact on the story my choices had, but I was so invested in the world that I found naming our big public event (Funplex Alpha 3) and eventual independent arcade (Quarter Up Arcade) so much fun. I chose to date Naomi and she was a no-brainer for me. A smart, capable, nerdy girl in glasses who is passionate about video games? *swoon* It says on the official site that they’re working on a sequel, called Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers, and though I don’t expect it’ll be out anytime soon, I am already hyped for it.

NBA 2K20

As was the case with NBA 2K16, I got this game free through PSN, but this time around the story mode didn’t hook me as deep. I played through a few games, cutscenes, and minigames, but ultimately I didn’t love the feel of the gameplay. I’m happy to have it and might return to it to mess around with some friends eventually, but I wasn’t altogether too impressed with this entry in the series.

Rage 2

Speaking of not being too impressed, I also started Rage 2 recently and, well, you’ll be surprised to read that I was… not too impressed. Granted, I’m not terribly far in the game, but so far the only thing bringing me back is that sweet, sweet id gunplay. I have such fond memories of some of the older Quake games that this old-school-esque gameplay feels comfortable and cozy. Unfortunately, many of the other gameplay elements, like level design and animations, also feel dated, but in a negative way. When they showed the trailer at E3 a couple/few years back, some people complained that it looked too similar to Borderlands. At the time, I thought it was premature to make that claim and figured there is room for various takes on a neon-tinged post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style open world. And maybe there is, but Rage 2 ended up being way too similar to Borderlands for my liking, and it makes any weaknesses that much more glaring because there is a critically acclaimed series to make direct comparisons with. I’ll keep playing because the gameplay is fun, but I’ll probably move on before finishing the story.

GRIS

I beat GRIS in a single sitting and it is just such a simple and beautiful game. It would make an excellent game to play with a class and discuss game design. It takes advantage of universal platforming knowledge and only complicates it beyond that in the slightest. The mechanics are minimal, which frees the player to just take in the gorgeous art that makes up the world. One of things that impressed me the most was how singular the world seemed to be. It didn’t seem like a series of screens with individual elements that had been placed here and there to make environments. It seemed like one gigantic canvas, each element drawn as a part of the whole, and you are a small blip that is just moving along as the camera sometimes slowly zooms in or out to reveal just how interconnected everything is. It’s hard to explain. I guess I might say that most platformers (because the individual platforms/assets are obviously separated from the background) seem like a series of ‘screens’ or small paintings, whereas this game seems like one gargantuan painting that you are navigating slowly but surely. Either way, what a moving story told almost exclusively with visuals. I think the only word in the entire game is “HOLD.”

The Last of Us Part II

I swear I usually finish games. Like, it’s a thing. I don’t like starting something if I have no intention of finishing it. I have finished some games that I really, really did not like. And yet this is the third game thus far that I have given up on. I do plan on going back to it, eventually, but I just didn’t feel like I was in the right emotional space for it at the time. I played for maybe 6-8 hours, and I liked what I played enough. It is, as you have probably heard/seen, a beautiful game. The subtleties and nuance in the acting performances were most impressive to me, and I look forward to seeing how the story plays out, but some of the implications about where the characters are going to be led were a bit heavy for me at this time. So maybe I’ll write a separate blog sometime down the line, when I finish it.

Ghost of Tsushima

I saved this one for last because, well, like literally every other person who’s played this game, I have a bunch of pictures that I am going to force upon you. I was so pleasantly surprised by Ghost of Tsushima. I thought the E3 trailer from last year looked pretty cool but it didn’t seem like my kind of game. I suppose because everyone seemed to assume it would play like a Souls game. I preordered it after a more recent gameplay trailer, because the open world looked beautiful and fun to navigate. It was, but the combat honestly ended up being my favorite thing about this game and kept me coming back. I wandered deep into a harder section of the map almost immediately, so I had virtually no skills to survive one particularly neverending group of enemies that kept killing me over and over again. Out of sheer stubbornness, I kept trying to best them, though, convinced I could pull it off. I could not, it turns out, but that practice against so many difficult foes made me very good at dodging and parrying early on, so once I started gaining abilities and stances, I felt unstoppable.

Before playing I was convinced I would choose the stealthy approach. Years of Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid games have prepared me for the art of the sneaky sneak. But, no. I enjoyed combat so much in Ghost that I would actively seek out large groups of enemies at every turn, to engage in the fast dance that was slicing my way through their ranks one parry at a time. Did I get myself into trouble and die? Sure, a few times. But more often I would stroll up to a camp of two or three dozen Mongols, as brazen as can be, and walk away soaked in the blood of my enemies mere minutes later. It was such a visceral thrill. Aside from that, yes, the game was gorgeous and I loved taking a million pictures in photo mode. I also liked the story and characters quite a bit and, as a fan of Ubisoft’s open-world games, I loved traveling around the world and writing haiku, chopping bamboo, collecting sword kits, and more. In a year with Persona 5 Royal and Final Fantasy VII Remake I don’t think this is my game of the year thus far, but it’s close.

Diss Bits: Punch Line and Trans Representation

I said recently that I wanted to start using these posts as a way to work out some thoughts as part of my dissertation work, and I just finished reading a chapter that contributes something to my previous thoughts on the game Punch Line. In those thoughts, I stopped short of calling the game a queer game or the protagonist a transgender character. After thinking about it more and discussing it with a friend, I began to think it probably was at least in part an allegory for the trans experience, intentional or not. As a refresher, from that post: “Yuuta is a man’s spirit in a woman’s body, presenting as a man (and voiced by a woman). It’s a little convoluted. He was a man, and because of an event in the game, he ended up swapping spirits with a woman, who swapped spirits with another man. In the end, a plan does emerge to return Yuuta to his original body. So, technically speaking, Yuuta is not a trans character, but I think it’s interesting and important that the main character of this game is, in an abstract (or symbolic) way at least, trans.”

If Yuuta was intended to be a character that represented the trans experience, I later thought, does that suggest that the Japanese see transgender people as the soul of one gender in the body of the opposing gender/sex? So Yuuta would be a trans man. The spirit of a man “trapped” in a woman’s body. Let’s ignore the performative part of his gender because it only complicates things and is more superficial than his lived gender.

I thought I remember coming across this idea of a gendered spirit trapped in an opposite gendered body in another game, in which they explicitly state that, but I can’t seem to find it. I thought it might have been Catherine: Full Body, and it might just have been, but I skimmed through the hundreds of screenshots I took of that game and I couldn’t find any line of dialogue that stated that. Regardless, I just ran across it in Mark McLelland’s chapter in the book I’m reading, Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, titled: “Japan’s Original ‘Gay Boom’.” In it, he says “The category most commonly used to describe postwar danshô was ‘urning’ (ûruningu), a sexological term that had been devised by German sexologist and homosexual Karl Ulrichs (1825-95) to designate a ‘female soul in a male body’ and which had achieved widespread currency in prewar sexological writings” (161). McLelland is introducing this concept to describe the Japanese gei bôi, who are more akin to femme gay men rather than trans women, but I think the fact that the phrase and concept were so popular in queer communities so long ago in Japan is significant and might support my previous idea that many Japanese people see trans people differently than people in the West: as simply one ‘spirit’ in the body of another.

With that in mind, I would go back and revise my previous claim that I can’t call Punch Line a queer game, or Yuuta a trans character. I would argue now that they are, regardless if the developers meant them to be or not. I think there’s sufficient textual evidence to back that up, plus now I know that the concept of ‘spirits’ (probably not in the literal sense, though that’s worth investigating, too) is a popular way for Japanese people to understand gender, which makes me think that the game’s depiction of genders being swapped is not at all an accident.

Obviously I need to do more research specifically on this issue, but because my dissertation will probably only briefly touch on queer representation in Japanese games, I’ll have to wait on that. It’s something I’m very interested in, though. As I’ve said before, Japanese game developers have a complicated history with queer representation, and I think it bears a much closer examination than we give it in our mainstream discussions. Hopefully someday I can get around to doing some of that work. For now, the dissertation.

Regret

This is not a video game post. So, no, I won’t be talking about my regret for ever having played Myst or not placing higher in the 1994 Blockbuster World Video Game Championship regional finals. No, this is a post about plain ol’ regret. More specifically, I wanted to write about my own relationship with regret. Nothing too specific, so this is also not some kind of private journal entry, but I came to a realization about my history with regret recently and wanted to write it down for future reference. I’d hate to… regret not sharing it. Eh? Eh? No? Well, damn. Now I… regret making that joke okay okay I’m sorry, I’ll stop.

For much of my younger life, my teens and early twenties, I was the type of person who loved to proclaim that I wouldn’t change a thing about my past because, if I did, it would probably change who I was in the present and I didn’t want that. You know the type. “No regarts.” Which, looking back, was kind of weird, given that I was often deeply unhappy with certain aspects of my life. I think it might have been rooted in a fear of losing myself, of becoming someone unfamiliar. I clung to an authentic “me” that I was proud of, even if I’d wished I was better looking or smarter or more charming or whatever. I feel like many of us struggle to define ourselves in those years, trying new things and experimenting to find the “us” that we subconsciously want to be. So to imagine throwing all of that hard work away by hypothetically changing something in the past felt scary.

Later, during some of my most serious bouts with depression and anxiety, I regretted everything. I would find myself dwelling on the past often. What if I had asked that girl out? What if I had stood up for myself that one time? What if I’d actually tried to do well in high school? My regrets were both broad and specific. I might wish I had been more, I dunno, outgoing. Or I might wish that I had been more clear about my feelings when making a sad attempt at asking Amy out in my first semester of college. Either way, I’d wish something had been different. It makes sense, right? I was so unhappy with how things were that I would have gladly risked any changes to my present state by making changes, big or small, to the past. Any bit of happiness, even if just a brief moment years ago, seemed completely worth it.

I’ve been in therapy for a little over a year at this point, and one of the most useful aspects of the process, for me, is introspection. I “did the work,” as my therapist says. And when I thought about regret, and how my relationship with it has changed over the years, I realized that it used to be toxic (in both previously mentioned ways). But over this last year I think I’ve come to find a healthy balance to my regrets. I can’t change the past, of course, but while I may not dwell on it and actively wish I could change it, I can still look back at my regrets and admit to myself that maybe I do wish I’d done things differently. Instead of wallowing in sadness and anger about it, though, and wishing I actually did do things differently, I ask myself what I would do if that thing happened today. I can’t fumble my way through a relationship proposition with Amy from college again, but if I happen to be attracted to a woman now, instead of being indirect and coy about my feelings, I would be direct and open. If someone does something that makes me uncomfortable or crosses a clear boundary, instead of avoiding the subject and just hoping that they’ll “get” why I’m upset, I’ll tell them. I still allow myself to regret things, but only if I learn from them. I did something I didn’t like? Don’t do it again. I wish I would have done that one thing? Do it next time.

I’m not deluding myself by believing that my relationship with regret is perfect, even now. I’ll continue to make mistakes, even some of the same I’ve made in the past, and I’m sure I’ll find myself in a position where I dwell on a particular regret for too long. But I feel much better about my past, my present, and my regrets than I used to.

The Reavis Companion

Blogging with Dragons

Geek life, it's like real life, but with dragons.

The Side Quest Arcade

EightBitBlonde

Musings on Geek and Gaming Culture

Gaming Diaries

The adventures of a life in games and my real geeky life when it takes over.

The Hannie Corner

Reading Books and Playing Games All Day

Accessing Rhetoric

notes on rhetoric, composition, dis/ability & accessibility

smarshc.wordpress.com/

A Dame’s Gotta Game - A fun blog with a focus on gaming, collecting, & pop culture.

Why We Play Games

Analyzing video games

ageekygal.com/

Later Levels

XP comes with age

Deconstructing Video Games

Articles and analysis on games old and new

The Gaming Teacher

Video Games - Education - Life

Discover WordPress

A daily selection of the best content published on WordPress, collected for you by humans who love to read.