I know this blog is said to be about anime and music, but as an extension of my mind, there's times in which your inspiration are more inclined to topics that you couldn't predict it. Today, we're going to write a essay about my relationship with other hobby: gaming.
I've always have been a console person, since childhood, owning the older consoles. That totally means single-player games and local multiplayer games, preferably co-op. I didn't know about online competitive games for a long time. In this almost two decades of gaming on PS1, PS2, PS3 and low-end PC, I've collected a lot of good memories, and some little hot takes like:
Are you sure you wanna read this? Then click this line of text, and don't be mad at me!
GTA San Andreas is way better than GTA V.
The personality of the main characters on V are just... terrible! And what's going on Michael's family? Of course, we know it's a satire, but they're went too hard on making them look so miserable at least I don't have the patience to see that again, it's not funny. San Andreas's main cast is iconic, they feel actually real most of the time, not just a mere byproduct of satire. And on top of that, they keep sending the players their messages, so its writing works better for me.
San Andreas map is so small, yet feels so big. I don't know why. I don't know it's the fact it has three main cities with various countrysides, the small render distance keeping things separate, or the design of streets, roads and highways. Maybe it's all of the above. The thing is, traveling around the world of GTA V isn't as enjoyable as it is in San Andreas: And before you think about it, curb your accusations of me wearing rose-tinted glasses, please. I finished V a long time ago on PS3, then later I went to San Andreas and made the 100% completion on it. It's special in that way.
Demon's souls is overrated.
It does not hold up to their good fame. Demon's is far from being great. It's a festival of bugs, one of which is why I didn't managed to beat the game. There was an area I couldn't get past. I thought it was a weird puzzle, but I asked someone who managed to beat the game before me for some help, he also couldn't get it through. My main suspect is that it was a bug, and my save file was doomed. It had nothing to do with the difficulty. Hey, don't be so mad at me. Read this essay I wrote about what's wrong with being an elistist. Anyway, I don't see myself trying any title from this series ever again, because I also beat Dark Souls 1 once and in the next run, I thought it was a little boring after Ornstein and Smough. Plus, I'm getting older, I don't have the time and the patience to put on this. A good challenge is essential to any game. But when your difficulty comes from artificial sources like lack of polishment, bugs and badly designed puzzles, your game is bad, period.
A love and hate relationship with a rhythm game
If you could handle those hot takes, it's time to move topics and read about the competitive game I once loved the most: osu! is that rhythm game in which you click circles. I enjoyed the game for at least an year, but the game is organized in such a way that you are compelled to compete. If you hit the ceiling and cannot get better, you can start to feel burned out, frustrated. It's no surprise. The game has a global ranking with all the players inside, and it's countinuous: to the rate the game grows and more people start playing, the harder the competition becomes, and if you can't invest enough time on it, you can't even maintain the rank - you'll lose positions.
Playing for fun? Yes, that would be ideal. But part of the fun on a rhythm game is competing against yourself, to the point you can finish your favorite beatmap with a full-combo - and good accuracy. Nowadays I can't beat my scores from back then, so it's not fun anymore. This saddens me, because I love the songs I discovered through this game, the gameplay itself is nice, and the game runs so nice in my 85 Hz
I do wish the multiplayer worked like competitive shooter games. Keeping casual and ranked modes separate and working the global ranking through seasons that lasts 3-6 months. But at the moment, for us to play casual, we need to log out and play offline only. This is a problem because we can't store our progress.
It's a shame, really. Good part of my audio hobby grew by some songs I used to play in this game. Songs which I listen to it, and makes me go back to osu!. But as soon as I do it, I get bored after less than 30 minutes. I really, really didn't things to be like this.
Next up, I'm ditching a game because it was too good.
I used to beat a game and get to the next. It was like this until Borderlands 2. The greatest replay factor I ever seen. It has been almost five years since I started to play. Apart from some sprinkled months of hiatus, I didn't think to stop that seriously until recently.
After all this time being unable to stop playing BL2 because it's too good to play on split screen, it's time to make yet another hiatus, but a serious one this time. The PS3 has a good library, forcing myself to discover new things could be just as fulfilling, if not more. So I did a backup of the save files and uninstalled the game. Hopefully this creates an effective hurdle so we can play other titles.
I don't see a reason to get a gaming PC anymore.
There's many reasons I don't pursue that cutting-edge gaming PC or heavyweight gaming laptop anymore. The power-hungry graphics cards, relying more and more on handicaps like AI upscaling and frame generation are killing game optimization. Besides, our digital game collection is not actually ours. It's all licensed. You pay for an access, but cannot own it. Your relatives won't inherit it. You can't borrow your friend's game like we used to. If it's already like this, why spend thousands anyway? If we can't own it, just save this money and buy a cloud gaming subscription. At least, that's my plan to the short-term future. There's also those games-as-a-service, like gacha games, but this a story for other day, this post is already way too long.
Thank you for reading! If you made it until here and didn't get bothered with me rambling, you deserve a reward. This album has the Deus Ex Human Revolution soundtrack. One of the finest works on video game music ever made, one of my favorite game soundtracks ever.