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Thoughts on GamePass Games like Wolfenstein: Youngblood and More

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Microsoft must really want people to buy Game Pass subscriptions. Not only do they keep putting it on sale (sign up for 30 days for only $1, even if you already previously subbed!), but they keep allowing for all sorts of hacks that allow you to extend a Game Pass sub for less than face value.

In fact, they’re not just allowing it, but enabling it. If you buy three months of Xbox Live Gold, you can convert it into 50 days of Game Pass Ultimate. So when I found a place selling 3-month codes for Gold for only five bucks, I managed to land myself a little more than half a year’s worth of Game Pass Ultimate for less than the cost of a single month.

Sounds like a dream come true, except it’s not. The problem I’m facing is that, to be honest, Game Pass offers nothing that really lights my fire and only a handful of games that I’m kinda/sorta interested in. →  Today I consider myself the luckiest reader on the face of the earth.

The Last of Us Rereleases and Remasters

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Currently playing: Resident Evil 3 Remake

I’ve seen some … complaints about the fact that Sony is planning yet another re-release of The Last of Us.

To be clear, I get it. On the surface, it does seem nuts that a single game would get three different releases, across three different consoles, in less than a decade. And these are distinct products – with their own unique changes, features, and additions – rather than straight ports of the original code to new hardware.

At a certain level, it feels bad. Maybe you consider it a cynical cash grab for Sony to do this. Maybe you think it points to a general lack of creativity and new ideas. Maybe it seems bizarre because the original, PS4-based remaster works on PS5.

However you feel, I get it. But – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – I also get where Sony is coming from, at least in regards to this new, upcoming release.

The Last of Us Part 1 – the name for this second re-release, which pairs nicely with the name of the sequel, The Last of Us Part 2 – has multiple, (in my opinion) reasonable justifications for existing. →  It might come in handy if you, the master of reading, take it with you.

The Future of (my) Video Games

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Currently playing: Wasteland 3

Hoping for the best, planning for not the worst

I spend a lot of my time thinking about retiring in my 50s. I spend the rest of my time planning for the breakdown of society. The incompatible ideas constantly vying for my conscious attention will occasionally drown each other out and allow general concepts of family, work, and video games to briefly occupy my brain. These short moments of distraction are usually then reframed in my mind so as to view them through one of the primary thought patterns – where will I live in relation to my children after I stop working, or does a year’s worth of water for an infant equal a year’s worth of water for an adult?

Sometimes I think of my physical game collection through these lenses of retirement or environmental destruction. The enormous amount of plastic involved, which I recently learned can’t actually be recycled, and also began to appear in antarctic snow in measurable quantities, does not factor into my thoughts – I don’t believe individuals should feel responsible for systemic problems unless they’re actively profiting off of maintaining the systems or are my neighbor, that guy’s an asshole (too bad he isn’t hunting frequently enough to prevent him from buying bumper stickers about how badly he would rather be hunting). →  You’re tearing me apart lamers!

Aesthetic Gachaism

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Here’s a pretty cool post from indie game developer Keith Burgun. It’s about a concept he labels as “aesthetic gacha-ism”, which he describes as follows:

The core of my conception of aesthetic gacha-ism is the commodification of games: both in how they are produced, the rules, the experience, the way it’s talked about. At nearly every level, the experience of games gets put more and more onto an assembly line, alienated from human experience, connection and meaning.

He then goes on to list some of the core tenets of Aesthetic Gacha-ism:

  • Extrinsic-reward driven (AKA “the metagame is more important than the base game design”)
  • Elements feel copy-pasted a lot, and/or “subdivided” to increase length
  • Compulsion-driven design
  • The (dreaded) crafting system
  • Commodified quests
  • More and more things “level up” in some way

(The author elaborates on all of these bullet points within the actual piece, so I encourage you to read through it.)

I too have had a feeling in the back of my mind that there was something intrinsically different about the way modern games are designed, but as usual I’ve always found it hard to put my thoughts into words. →  Now you’re reading with power.

Out Run, I Mean Outrun Culture

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A few months ago I found myself buying (and playing) the Sega Ages version of Out Run on Switch. It’s a great port with some interesting new features, and it made me appreciate the game all over again. Eventually I found myself doing some historical research on the game to learn more about its development and legacy.

Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. My search results were dominated not by Out Run, but by …. Outrun.

As far as I can tell, “Outrun” is the name of both a subgenre of synth music, and a surrounding subculture. According to the Outrun subreddit’s description, Outrun is:

Dedicated to the synthwave music scene, a revisionist 80s music style of synthesizers and pulsing beats, and the retrofuturist 80s aesthetic of fast cars, neon lights and chrome.

And the wikipedia entry says:

Synthwave (also called outrun, retrowave, or futuresynth) is an electronic music microgenre that is based predominantly on the music associated with action, science-fiction, and horror film soundtracks of the 1980s.

 →  Shining Post: Legacy of Great intention

Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time

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After the recent scandal wherein President Carter revealed that the classic WonderSwan game Knuckle Justice: Fist of Freedom, Face on Fire (KJFoFFoF) was not an actual video game but rather an elaborate ruse perpetrated by stock insiders to bolster their Bandai holdings, the game industry has been looking inward and has not liked what it has found. With a key pillar supporting the entire enterprise of gaming now left crumbling into the ocean of deception below, it is unclear even to game historians if any actual video games have ever been produced or developed. It is against this tumultuous backdrop that we present you with our intensive research on the Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time.

5. Rival Turf

With its overt graphics and controller support it is hard to deny this is a game. Experts are still studying the specific signals of the alleged controller outputs because it has been suggested by skeptics the movement of what is undeniably graphics on screen is actually following a semi-random program routine. →  SaGa Frontier Readmastered

Top 10 Trends I Ignored – An Old Man is Prideful of His Ignorance

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In the dozen years since I used this site as a platform for bad jokes, Wii apologia, and po-faced discussion on design, many gaming trends have come, and in some cases, gone. Having ignored most of these shifts in the industry, I will now document these trends and explain why I am better than each of them.

  1. MMOs

These already existed when this site launched in 200…something. As I am competing with my dead grandfather at having the fewest friends, I worried social gaming would lead to comradery and therefore defeat. This fear was unfounded, however, as years on gaming forums have led me to accumulate exactly zero new acquaintances. “Who is that condescending guy who only posts single sentences that are obviously sarcastic?” is what I assumed people would say. Warnings from moderators and replies from people who thought I was serious are instead all I got. Many true artists are not understood until their work is reanalyzed and contextualized, often years or decades after their deaths. →  I’ll get a job later, for now I’m going to read this

Connecting Old Consoles to New TVs: Now with Fewer Details

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My old Pioneer plasma that now lives in a closet covered in a blanket had a lot of video inputs. Component and VGA inputs were casualties of my recent upgrade to OLED. Time marches on, unless you still want to play old game consoles or accidentally slip and fall and become frozen in a crevasse. Then, assuming you fall into the former and not the frozen category, you need to decide if composite video is sufficient for your fully-thawed, unconventional, yet not uncouth tastes.

For me, composite would not do, partly because I realized my new TV was capable of it only after I finished the project I will be explaining in excruciating detail. This fact aside, in order to get the best picture out of the old games I always plan to play but rarely do, I learned I would need to embark on a potentially never-ending-always-spending project. And now you can, too!

First, a quick technology primer written by a layman for other people who reworked their major’s required credits to not require college level electronics. →  Read or die.

Timely Thoughts on Mega Man 8

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This is one of two mainline Mega Man games that got away from me (the other being MM10). This is the first time I’ve ever played Mega Man 8 in any capacity. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not all that good.

This game is very much a product of its time. The 32-bit console era was a period of great transition, as the industry not-so-gradually pushed into 3d gaming. When it came to old, existing franchises from the 2d era, this led to a bit of a crisis. As in animation, gaming had to deal with the fact that a lot of its audience quickly came to the conclusion that 3d graphics were better than 2d as a matter of course.

You could make a gorgeous 2d game on the Playstation (or Saturn) hardware with huge levels and interesting mechanics, and there would be a significant contingent of players who would simply refuse to play it. Or you could just make a decent looking game that played like it’s predecessors from the 8 or 16-bit eras, and there would be a significant contingent of reviewers who would ding it for being old fashioned. →  I regret learning to read.

10 Steps to Making Money with a Gaming Blog

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People often ask me why I waste my vast cornucopia of knowledge of all things business on a minuscule website. I can afford to do this because I retired at the age of 14 after selling multiple blogs for millions of dollars a pop. This site provides a platform to share my expertise without the threat of anyone emailing for follow up information. Follow the 10 steps below (each as important as the last and therefore all assigned the number 1) and you, too, can retire at 14 by selling your weblog.

  1. Choose how much you want to make

The first step anyone reasonable takes before doing anything creative is to analyze the market and choose a segment that matches desired returns. How much would you like to make from blogging? Assuming you chose billions, we can then conclude you need to write about video games. There may be skeptics who are unaware games are a $280 billion a year industry and so I will spell it out in painful detail for these slower than average readers. →  You reading at me?