In the game that is life, I feel as if I’m perpetually stuck on the character creation screen
Shouting Waaaaaaaaaaah at the top of my lungs
furiously pressing *lengthen nose button* repeatedly
fueled by a pure sense of frustrated hysteria
I keep foolishly thinking I’m going to have an exorbitant amount of free time to play video games during my weekends, which alas, has been a totally fucking wrong deduction on my part. I’m also unfortunately feeling the need to view gaming through the lens of productivity in some respects, to get through as much as possible just in general, but also so I have a constant stream of content to write about. I tend to only commit to small blurbs every day on some months, I’m failing to recall how I kept this up when I was running a commercial gaming website, or even how streamers do this shit for more than half the day all the time.
Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s
crushing societal standards to succeed
under insane pressure all the time
To both my last point and my cold open, I was attempting to squeeze in the idea of starting a new title, in spite of a pack daily schedule when I was reminded Avowed just launched, this after reading some interesting feedback about the title in the recent Edge magazine, only to have stupidly misunderstood the assignment of what a “quick” play would entail. In the regard of not having much time at the moment, and by forgetting the game was not entirely dissimilar to an Elder Scrolls game, and to that point, having a massive god damn character creator to get through. With only a good hour to spare on the clock, I just shook my head thinking”definitely playing this…another time it looks like.” Good character creators are usually so intense, they represent a meta-game in and of themselves, and I’m nearly surprised someone hasn’t made some quirky parody spin off mobile game where that and only that is the entirety of the game.
In the reality where Anime Armpit games exist,
anything is terrifyingly possible
I guess to tie this post to some kind of recent gaming news, I recently read that Todd Howard, in being interviewed as hype for the upcoming 21st BAFTA Game Awards, mentioned he thought Tetris and Pac-Man were two of the most important games of our time, but that Mario and Doom were two of the most influential titles, more so suggesting the former two as important for their cultural impact on the zeitgeist, and the latter two in terms of design. Hard to argue his perspective, as I’ve even come to bat with the grandeur that is Tetris more than a decade ago during the genesis of my long running series Encyclopedia Muranica. I haven’t discussed much in the way of Pac-Man, but Ms.Pac-Man stands as one of my fav arcade cabinets of all time, and it’s nature of being one of the first massive commercial hits while simultaneously being a romhack helped move the needle for game development moving forward. Not much that can be said about Mario that wouldn’t represent the metaphorical equivalent of a beaten horse corpse at this point, and I gush about the awesomeness that is Doom on a regular basis, so I’d tend to agree.
Poetry in motion, and unrivaled performance art, truly
I had more of an overall point I was planning on expounding upon, but I’ve become distracted in my musings, and I suppose a meaningful takeaway isn’t always needed when you’ve spent just a couple of minutes having fun.
~Pashford
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