So, what do you say we clean out some cobwebs? Like last January, here's a brief list of what I played these last few months in order of which I can remember them:
Catherine: See, the funny thing about Catherine is that I really wanted to play it, but I never wanted it in my house. The marketing for the game was a little on the salacious side, mostly having to do with the cover art it's accompanied promo materials. Now, my spicy wife is not a judgmental person and I'm certainly no prude, but even though I knew that the game wasn't that pervy from everything I heard about it, I never jumped that hurdle. Lucky for me, I have friend that will buy any video game if it's cheap enough, and he loaned me a copy of it roughly eight months ago. So, yeah. The irony that I never wanted to buy it because I though it might be sleezy never mattered because it sat firmly in my home for close to a year unplayed is not lost on me.
This same friend loaned me a stack of other games in October, so in an effort to clear the backlog of stuff that I didn't actually own, I bum rushed through all of them between December and last week. Of them, Catherine was the undisputed champ. A great, complex puzzle game and goofball anti-dating sim rolled into one, it was the unholy union of two genres I don't really care about made into something kind of brilliant. Sadly, it was the last of this round of borrowed games that I went through, so I forced myself to ratchet down the difficulty to Easy so I could finish it, but this might also wind up being the rare video game that I end up buying anyway because of how unique the whole thing was. I'm all talk, so we'll see about that, but still. I call that a good recommendation.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: This is Catherine's counterpoint in just about every way. An action game made by Platinum set in the Metal Gear Solid universe, it is both absurdly precise in its combat and stupidly verbose in everything else; a combination that made me want to turn it off for good more than once. Still weirdly satisfying until right at the end of the game which featured a final boss that was close to being another deal-breaker. I get that action games like this, especially ones made by the mad scientists behind Bayonetta and Godhand, want you to have intimate knowledge of their systems and mechanics and be able to prove that with a challenging final encounter. What I don't get is the spike in difficulty from tough-but-fair to do-this-right-the-first-time-or-tough-shit. This was a late night that should have been an early evening. To me, Platinum's games have always been like a glass of wine: I'll drink one if it's in front of me, but I'll never order it myself. Revengeance is a stupid name, but it was an ok game. And I'm Platinum-ed out for a while.
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes: Is there any way to make Master Miller shut up? This is a serious question.
Tales of Graces F: Holy shit. This game was actually pretty good, and nobody is as shocked as I am. For all of the flak I can throw at JRPGs, this wound up being a good time. FULL DISCLOSURE: I skipped probably 85% of the cutscenes, and during the ones that I did let play I was probably fiddling with Spotify or something, so this might have played a significant factor in my enjoyment, but fun is fun. I didn't wind up completing the post-game epilogue before giving it back to my pal, and I kind of regret it. That's ok, though, because...
Dragon Age: Inquisition: Pretty much the first game to come out for current-gen systems that I couldn't wait to buy, it was my sole purpose for the month after it was released. My first run clocked in at some big dumb number like 85 hours, but being a nutcase, I cranked up the challenge to Nightmare and started over immediately after finishing with a new character so I could get that equally dumb platinum trophy. Truth time: I was a little underwhelmed, even after all of that.
Ok, I loved The Gaslight Anthem's breakout album, The '59 Sound. It was unquestionably the best record I had heard that year, and I eagerly awaited everything that came after it. Of course, nothing will ever come close. Being the first album I had heard from the band, and something of a renewal of my vows with the fickle mistress that is post punk, it was everything that I needed in my musical life without knowing it. Great works of art blindside you that way. Their next album, American Slang, went noticeably mid-tempo. This wasn't a bad choice, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and ultimately wound up being a letdown because it didn't re-bottle that lightning from the previous record. Everything they've released since has been a mixed bag of genius and garbage. Would I feel this way if I had heard Handwritten first? I can't say. Dragon Age: Origins, then, was my '59 Sound. It came out at the tail end of a particularly great year as far as my personal gaming tastes are concerned (Street Figher IV! Borderlands! Demon's Souls, for God's sake!), and was so consuming that I spent hundreds of hours digging through every square inch of content. Dragon Age II has gotten a lot of poop on the internet for being a lesser game, and it definitely was. But, like American Slang, it did its own thing for better or for worse. There are certainly things to hate about it, but there was that much more to love. DA2 is not a terrible video game, but it would never have filled the hole in my heart for more of the exact same thing --which I know that I don't really want anyway-- no matter how astounding it could have been.
Inquisition, then, is actually that kind of astounding. The characters are great, the world is bafflingly big, and the whole things is stunning to look at. But the magic isn't there anymore; at least, not like it was. Still a great game by most means, and I certainly have the hours put into it to prove that I must have enjoyed it somehow.
I took a break from games for a little over a week after it was over and I obtained the platinum trophy to ponder it. I wondered if this was indicative of something larger. Is this it, I would posit. Is the thrill really gone? Of course I went back, but the older I get, the more this gives me pause. It's hard to be as excited for new experiences as I was as a younger man, and I have become more interested in preserving that which gave me pleasure a lot more often than I used to. The fact that I'm still regularly playing Third Strike every week with friends (gentlemen's game that it is) is proof of this all of these years later. For now, it's nice to know that I'll always have interesting things to play, whether they're new games that come down the line or old stuff that will rekindle my interest in the medium. There's comfort in that.
I've been forcing myself to play through Resonance of Fate over the last week or so on the recommendations of the internet as a whole. It is not without its problems, but I think that, now in its final two thirds, I've hit enough of a stride that I get why people like it. It's the kind of RPG I would have been all over about 10 years ago. Now, it's a bit of a chore, but I'm finding myself perversely happy that games like this still exist. This past weekend, my friend and I met and exchanged the usual stack of games that we've finished, and now I have Shadow of Mordor, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Darksiders II waiting for me when it's finished. I'm not expecting any of them to really blow my hair back, but hey.
It's a new year. You never know.
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