Other than that, it was a nice summer gaming-wise, basically just depressed by the general world situation depression. But hey, if we’re going to go down, we’re certainly going to do it entertained, or at least well occupied. Stray, Two Point Campus, Cult of the Lamb, Rollerdrome, Hard West 2, Xenoblade 3, South of the Circle, Splatoon 3, and now it’s suddenly fall, which is guaranteed to provide plenty of stuff to gamble on. That is, if you can afford the electricity and aren’t too cold to sit motionless on the couch and just move your thumbs. So: As gloomy as it looks right now, I’m looking forward to going through the week with you again on small, big and often personal topics. Stay brave. Play on!

Contents

5 Hits I Don’t Like – Career Suicide Edition

Okay, this is going to be fun. Beforehand and for those who may be here for the first time: Of course I’m not judging anyone who loves these, often rightly and even on this site highly rated games. It’s about what bothers me about them and where I bounce off them, even though an everything gamer like me should actually devour them on paper. Well, that’s settled, let’s get into the hornet’s nest.

Red Dead Redemption 2 / Grand Theft Auto

Starts off well when you can’t agree on either of them right at the beginning, doesn’t it? But basically, my problem is similar over and over. I’ve put a lot of time into both of these universes, and appreciate them for the craftsmanship and artistry that goes into supposedly trivial details alone. I’ve even written many, many articles about what’s so good about the way Rockstar builds its worlds. You only have to stand on the sidewalk in Liberty City and close your eyes to get a phenomenally good sense of the space that surrounds you. Things like that, or the headlights caressing the horizon that you often stare at with such distant envy. These are things that don’t happen by themselves, and speak to a groundbreaking love of small but immensely important things that make this studio’s work feel like magic at times. These worlds are undoubtedly modern masterpieces, and the stories have some fantastic moments as well.

Panoramas to revel in. But that’s all I feel like doing in these games.

That doesn’t change the fact that the core of these games is rarely classically fun for me. Either the cynicism of the GTAs gets on my nerves badly, the general badness of the people in both of these games, or the gunfights in Red Dead get so trivial and whack-a-mole-ish that it regularly strangles my cowboy romance with a Rambo headband. Add to that, over and over, long driving or riding paths that are supposed to serve as gameplay and we have two game universes that, while they regularly have me as a guest for 20, 30 hours and give me unforgettable moments, almost always lose me at some point never to be seen again. The end is just watched on Youtube. But hey, it could be worse. If I say something like that about Red Dead and GTA, you can imagine what kind of chances open worlds with less ambitions have for me. I usually have to press Alt+F4 the first time I sit down in a car…

Destiny 2

I know, “Looting and leveling, that has to be in a game”. But in my case it must be due to my age, that the acquisition of more and more powerful equipment as a central game element subjects me to a leisure stress that I would rather do without. Destiny is also only representative for games from Borderlands to Diablo. But I’m most sorry for Destiny because I like how the world looks, how it’s laid out, and how the combat feels. It’s all fantastically done. But once I go back to primarily comparing stats and thinking about droprates, the illusion of a meaty sci-fantasy universe falls completely apart for me.

What’s wrong with us that in worlds like this we care most about where it goes to the next shooting iron that’s a few points better than the last one?

I’m just not a numbers person who finds fun in trying to figure out the optimum. Instead, I’m saddened every time I have to retire a gun I like because it doesn’t represent the maximum mathematically possible. I know it’s also up to me not to do just that, and PvE experiences are more forgiving of that, but if you don’t want to play completely solo, you’re still going to get squeezed quickly. And if I’m honest, a world that, for all its visual magic, ultimately exists only for the numbers loses from the start.

Skyrim / Fallout

Another double entendre, but it’s already clear that these two are of the same twang. The last time one of Bethesda’s RPGs wowed me was Oblivion, and that was primarily because it was early 2006 and simply groundbreaking in that technique at the time. The idea of dropping a ring at the top of a mountain and theoretically being able to find it again down in the valley at some point, if it didn’t get stuck somewhere, enchanted me at the time. Since then, however, the problems with the Creation Engine pattern have only increased for me.

Baby kidnapped? That will have to wait, because I’m not leaving the house under a T-60!

Worlds that, while interesting and fun to populate (49 hours into Fallout 4, which I liked the least of any of these games), get lost in the nitty gritty of dumpster diving, lock picking, and inventory management. Bethesda’s brand of RPG has yet to find a way for me to satisfactorily unite its narrative-driven role-playing with its immense freedom. Story and gameplay almost always engage in a tug-of-war where I often don’t know which end of the string to stand on and tug. The fact that neither the shooter part of Fallout nor the melee combat of Skyrim is among the best of these disciplines shows me that these classics simply weren’t made for me.

Final Fantasy from 8 upwards

Sure, Final Fantasy 7 on the first PlayStation was celebrated by all of us at the time because it was technically and artistically groundbreaking, and even the eighth had its moments for me. But the bottom line is that Final Fantasy and I gradually drifted apart with the first step towards 3D. It’s hard to say what the reason was. Of course, one reason is certainly that at some point the designers thought that the amount of layers a character had was measured primarily in belts. But first and foremost, the reason is probably to be found in myself.

For me, there was more character in this. I should know, I put it in there myself with my own imagination. Isn’t fair to Final Fantasy, which dared to make a huge leap from one part to the next. It did work for enough people, which I think is nice. No problem going our separate ways.

Once upon a time, when I became addicted to the head-fucking characters and hand-pixellated scenes, my own imagination regularly had to go into advance to visually pad out the epic conflicts of, say, an FF6 in my mind’s eye. The visually more concrete modern Final Fantasys relieve me of this work. Today, of course, every game from jumpers to shooters has to struggle with this, whose principle could be implemented with only a few pixels back then (and I had my little problems with the look of the New Super Mario Bros. for example). But Final Fantasy’s design is increasingly aiming past my personal design sensibilities. The penchant for pomp and kitsch that the games always succumb to – and which, yes, has its friends – simply didn’t feature in my vision of these worlds. The result just isn’t for me. Hey, Square, how about doing your younger Final Fantasys as Dragon Quest XI S-style demakes? Then maybe it could be something with us again!

Starcraft

Here we go again with the fact that I’m not big on math and I’m just not a min-maxer. It’s sad mainly because I’ve loved real-time and build-up strategy in principle ever since a sandworm first ate my Spice Harvester in Dune 2 on the Amiga. Later we played Command and Conquer 2 on networked PlayStations and later on the Internet and I still love it online. Thematically I liked Warcraft and Starcraft even more and what Blizzard did with the units and the story I always thought was fantastic. I could lose myself in that lore for hours. However, as soon as it went towards Starcraft on the net, it sporiated me so much that I lost all desire for it. Instead of building cool bases, these battles are done with the passion and machine precision of a spreadsheet, and to me that’s more like work than anything else.

You tell me where the front is and where the back is….

So, that’s my five gaming legends and their special idiosyncrasies that keep me at arm’s length like pointed elbows and shoulders held out. What are some classics that you just can’t seem to warm up to?

The most important of the week week 36, Alex Edition

In rotation: At Better Call Saul I’m deep into – Season 5 by now, and I’m sad every time it veers from Jimmy-and-Kim lawyer stories to the cartel track. It’s also well done, of course, but something in me fervently desires a Matlock-verse with these characters that I wouldn’t be sad if it never stopped. – Season three of Barry I’ll be tackling that soon, too. I have no idea how the good guy is going to get out of this jam. In terms of games, I’m currently busy with the tactical adventure game Sunday Gold – Test coming next week – and NBA 2k23, which in the Jordan edition is unfortunately pretty damn attractive to someone who, like me, discovered his love of basketball in the nineties….

Music Tip of the Week: It’s not my music anymore anyway, but after the new Machine Head really shocked me that the 28 year old debut sounds more modern and uncompromising in all aspects than the furious but bored palavering metal blandness of *sigh* “Öf Kingdom and Cröwn”, I was quickly back in meanwhile more familiar sound structures. So there was again the finally the new Julia Jacklin up and down. The track I Was Neon was already in episode 49 my tip of the week, but now the album is there and that is, well, pretty strong, not so easy to nail down to one style and still its own, coherent thing. And because in my opinion you can always measure a disc well by its last track, it sets here the bittersweetly whispered farewell End of a Friendship.

Highlight of the week: For the longest time, I thought FMV games all had very low-capped potential. I even thought that long enough to let Sam Barlow’s Her Story and Telling Lies pass me by. And now I’m hooked on his new game, Immortality, I’ve been hanging on the lips of a mysteriously disappeared actress for hours, tapping archival footage from her three films (all unreleased) for clues as to what happened to her. God, it’s good: from the production design, which does an excellent job of selling the time periods of the films – the flicks were made in 1968, ’72 and ’99 – to the outrageously good actors, often pushing the pain threshold, to the authentic production scenes before the director calls “action” or after the clapperboard drops. They, too, are regularly included, providing clues as to what happened and how the characters are connected.

And while you’re gawking at Immortality like that, sometimes it gawks back in a way that makes your heart drop.

To that end, it must be said that the game remains very vague for a long time – I haven’t gotten through it yet, and I’m not sure how specific it can get anyway – and really only explains its simple mechanics a bit. You watch archival footage from the movie clips, talk show appearances, and casting rehearsals, fast-forwarding and rewinding at whatever speed you want, and clicking on objects or people that catch your eye to go from there to a scene with something that matches. In this way, you’ll gradually unlock more and more takes, which will carry you back to a series of more scenes. Often enough it’s just the same actor or actress in another movie, but sometimes there are some insanely creepy a-ha effects when you manipulate the footage.

That’s all I really want to say about this, but it does feel richly off – in the good way – to bend your nose deeply over these film roles and look deep into the abysses of those involved. Somehow intimate, wrong and dangerous, you always feel like this mystery is better left unsolved. Fascinating – included in Game Pass and at 17 Euros not too expensive otherwise.

Point and clicks should like to be as creepy as The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow more often.

Oh, and with The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow a new horror point and click from Wadjet Eye has arrived, and after 10 trailer seconds I knew I had to play it. Test is coming at the end of the month – and that’s a good thing. I like to take my time with such titles.

Centerpiece (!?) of the week: Like probably many of you, we’re trying to be more conscious about energy. In the home office, I started and cleared my laptop to run at the desk and monitor, so that the computer, which is oversized for office tasks, does not run in vain. It’s not like you really need the horsepower every day. Also, the power is now cut off every standby in the evening, after the PS5 completely crashes anyway with felt every second gear into sleep mode (will something happen there again, Sony?). I’ve also realized the beauty and practicality of one-pot meals, and since then I’ve known that pasta softens in water as low as 82 degrees. Doesn’t even take longer because you’re using less water. Somehow also quite nice and actually overdue to question and check his consumption behavior. Too bad it’s for a bitter reason. Feels good though. Let’s see if I still don’t feel like crying at the upcoming energy cost test.

Low point of the week: Because the week before last was so lousy, it reverberates to this day and still spoils our days straight: The rear tire from our cargo bike burst – and some kind of special version. In other words, you can’t just buy it again at any bike store. Would not be so bad, would not the manufacturer just massive delivery problems with the tires. And so we’re sitting here now and have no idea how we got the kids from A to B back then. You get used to this logistical luxury very quickly. I really miss this bike and hope the replacement part will be at the door soon.

I’ll probably always love the thought of this game. But I’ll probably never play it again.

Oh, and then I tried once again to play DayZ to play and have to say that it shook me to my core how much I bounced off this game that I once idolized. But sometime between now and 2013, I think the Jank train must have left without me. Since then, I’ve also felt a strong dislike for games that expect me to provide their own entertainment, regularly wasting three-quarters of an hour of my life. Those who know how this game shaped me may understand how sad such a realization can be. There were times when I wanted to play nothing but this shoddy, permanently broken survival trip. And often enough turned night into day in the process. But today? Movement and aiming out of the halls, nothing of importance town by town and then suddenly dropping dead while eating berries because someone else found the pistol ammo first… sounds like a threat to me. Goodbye DayZ, but thanks for everything!