games

I was throwing away my old computers – not into a landfill, people took them, who do you think I am – and one of the things I found on one of the hard drives was a Minecraft server I was running back then. Unfortunately, it seems to be an old iteration before I moved it to a real server and actually built the thing I want to talk about. Oh well.

You can click on the image above to see the whole map, but there is not much to see except for this central part. We were in the resource gathering phase, if I remember correctly.

At some point on this server, I built my first mob farm. And while figuring out how to do it – how mobs spawn, how to transport them to a place where you could easily and safely whack them with a sword, that sort of thing – was fun in itself, the fact that it was being used by everyone on the server (which is just 3 or 4 people, but still) was much more satisfying.

Honestly, this is one of, if not the most satisfying gaming experience I have ever had. But as I said, I use games as a lens to talk about other things, so draw your own conclusions about the collaborative nature of human beings :)

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is awesome! All the main characters are people of color, voiced by actors of color (fuck Avatar, btw). The only romance in the show is between two gay boys. How rare is that?! It is also just a very fun cartoon in itself, with great animation, an amazing soundtrack, goofy characters, and, maybe a bit simplistic, but overall good message. It got all the important parts right, for sure!

In contrast to its sequel, I have even less to say about the first Quake. But I finished it and all the official mission packs, including the new ones from MachineGames.

Point of Mew is a little silly free game about a cat that helps its human. No, really helps. Sure, there is some destruction along the way, but who cares! Ahem.

I played Chasm: The Rift back in the day, but never finished it (probably got stuck in one of the maze-like levels). It was a sort of an answer to Quake. It has a similar hodgepodge of levels and enemies, tied together by a more coherent story, puzzle bosses that were dropped in Q2 and even enemy dismemberment and some destructible environmental elements. On the other hand, it has flat, Doom I/II-like levels. Is it worth checking out? As a piece of first-person shooter history, sure.

Zombie Hill Race seems very similar to Earn to Die games, to the point of confusion. Drive a little, earn some money, upgrade your car, drive a little more, repeat. Turn your brain off kind of game.

I think we as a society – at least that part that uses social media – lost a collective remote and every issue now is at the same, very high, volume.

It’s hard for me to take any publication, video blog, whatever else, seriously when at the same level of intensity there are, for example, a piece about how representation is still lacking and after that another one about how achievements are bad, comma, actually.

By the way, in case it wasn’t obvious, I have a habit of using video games as an example to talk about anything and everything. I know enough about them to feel confident, but even if I make a mistake, it is no big deal. So this is not just about video games.

Maybe it’s just me, but we kind of lost our pet peeves. Issues that are there, but, you know, less important. That have less of an impact on the final score, so to speak. But instead of writing examples of my video game pet peeves, I decided to share some of my, for lack of a better term, pet joys.

I like it when games treat their worlds like real places. Instead of a marker on a map, the NPC tells you to leave through the southern gate, get to the river, and follow the right bank until you see three dead trees.

I like it when games take some basic mechanics and wrap them up in an interesting way. Instead of just upgrading your characters, you build a settlement that attracts new people, which can then help your character grow and get better equipment.

I like it when games are open about their puzzle design. Tell me up front if I can solve it now, or if I don’t have the right thing yet. Give me hints when I’m struggling (subtly, please, otherwise it’s annoying). And at the end of the day, do not be afraid to just give me tools to help me find, solve, whatever.

Luna’s Fishing Garden is a short, chill farming sim. You fish, plant, gather, and so on. There is no pressure whatsoever and that is great.

In the never-ending search for what I call a podcast game, I tried a few of these roguelite, movement-only games: I played and liked Vampire Survivors before, and now there are a lot of similar games out there. Army of Ruin is probably the most accessible, it doesn’t hide anything. There are a lot of things to do and I have done them all. No, really, I did everything and I have proof :)

For more tricky stuff, this spreadsheet was very helpful.

Remedium: Sentinels is just an okay one, kind of in a why not category.

The re-release of Quake II is great. You get the original campaign, two mission packs (DLC of the time), an all new mission pack from MachineGames and a Nintendo 64 version.

If I remember correctly, while the N64 version is unique, the PlayStation version is a modified version of the original, so the fact that it is missing is okay, I guess.

There are improvements from lighting to accessibility, gamepad support on PC and keyboard/mouse support on consoles, and also small changes to some levels and an AI, oddly enough. I don’t want this to sound like an ad, so here are the release notes.

I don’t think I can judge the game properly. The fact that I write “2” as “][” is an indication that I spent too much time playing solo and with friends. In a computer club! Do people even remember/know about those? I also recognize something like this right away.

But I still have it in me to point out its flaws. I even hinted at them in a previous post with a picture of two achievements:

The portrayal of women is kind of bad. While yes, technically you can play as a female character because the game will take your model from your multiplayer config, and, hey, for the time that was something, all the cutscenes will still show a story of a dude – three different dudes for three original campaigns. Other than that, you only have one female enemy, and she is depicted… as she is depicted.

The portrayal of prisoners of war is shallow at best. “At best” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What to expect from the company that used to write game stories in a glorified and sometimes actual .txt file. Also, while you can change skin color in multiplayer, everyone in the game is white. Or at least they all have the same skin color, it is hard to tell with Borg-like creatures.

When you’re young, everyone is very eager to tell you that you’ll lose your strong opinions when you get older. I’m still waiting.

What actually happened to me is that I realized that it is impossible to have a strict rule – of law, moral, or any other kind – without many exceptions. Sometimes so many that it’s better to turn the rule on its head (from “it’s good unless” to “it’s bad unless” kind of thing).

I’ll use games as an example.

Let me put it this way, I’m not fun at parties: if you say to me “hey, remember that cool game?” I’m going to remember that it was published by a company that thought it was a good idea to advertise on 8chan, or that the developers were harassed and crunched a lot, or that despite having, like, two female characters, the game was both sexist and transphobic.

I also never thought that games were better back then, or that they ruined it, or anything like that. I felt like I evolved with the games, more or less. (To be fair, that has changed a bit in the last, say, 5 years or so, where I feel there are not enough games that challenge me with something new, but that is another story.)

Basically, what I’m saying is that I don’t do nostalgia. I don’t put old games on a pedestal. I rarely replay games.

But.

I spend about a week replaying the Quake II campaign, and playing all three mission packs, old and new, for the first time. I can’t deny that there’s a pleasure, a comfort in that experience. Q][ is my Doom. I played all the versions – PC, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. I found excuses to replay it a few times, like playing it with a Steam Controller.

Nostalgic? Sure. Old? Definitely. Replay? Absolutely.

I’ll talk about the re-release in the monthly summary, for now I’ll just point out that I have complicated feelings about it. There’s a lot not to like about the game, and I can’t really come up with an argument for someone who’s never played it to give it a try. I don’t think there’s any undeniable value in it. But I like it, I still do.

I’m not writing this to make excuses. I’m not writing this to say that it’s okay to have problematic faves. I still believe there are hills to die on, and I have plenty of them. I’m writing it to say that you can only hope – I can only hope – that you have a decent grasp on those very fuzzy good and bad things and can apply them as best as you can. Because I’m pretty sure there is no alternative.