Sure has been a while since I last posted on my site. Mainly I’ve been putting random shorter thoughts on my Cohost page and also recapping whatever it is I’m doing on Starfield, and that leads us to this page’s topic. Essentially I’m talking about the kind of game where people play it to just relax at the end of the day and are probably fine with the game in general, but it’s not pushing things forward by leaps and bounds regardless of how much it claims to be and might also not be a thing to return to decades on. This also tends to apply more significantly to any series that releases something annually like whatever sports or Call of Duty, or close to annual like Assassin’s Creed or even Pokémon as of late. Games that might try something but ultimately fall short for a lot of people due to possibly wanting some mass appeal and therefore less “weirdness” I guess. Scope would also be an issue here.
While AAA games are often the kinds found in the junk food pile, it’s also potentially any oversaturated genre that even indies get in on massively, things like typical “roguelikes” or “Souls-likes” or “battle royale-likes” to where the genre has been worn thin in the span of even as short as a year going from one to one quintillion or so. Games that are popular and therefore have guaranteed mass appeal and therefore everyone wants in on that money. This isn’t me just hating on popular genres either, even though this kind of also is because the genres that tend to take off also tend to not really appeal to me, so there’s that.
Yet there’s times where I’ll play the campaign mode in a Call of Duty game, at least in the games before there was a requirement to log into 16 different accounts to so much as look at the game’s menu, just because I wanna play a big dumb action movie with an attempt at a plot that might have its talking points. I feel like that’s how I’ve been approaching Starfield lately, having gotten into a set of missions often involving shooting swarms of creatures that seem to follow the general design of “evil alien” while also not quite getting a good look at them. Something like an Aliens licensed game, specifically focused on the actionized side of that series where there’s plenty of ammo and plenty of things to receive it.
So while there’s legitimately excellently-received games that push series or tech or games overall that I want to and also do play at times, I also keep ending up back at the side of games that are more just junky or comfort type stuff. Just depends on my mood. Perhaps an indicator of a tired one, given most of my game playing takes place outside of work hours and work can get pretty busy so I don’t really want to think too much in order to refresh.
But then there’s the weird side of budget games that were generally happening fairly often until the middle of the 360/PS3 era, where niche stuff that was barely marketed and went through the most budget of publishing strategy was effectively replaced by the indie market. Those strange budget games can be considered a bit of a different junk type, like unusual flavors of chips found at international markets. That’s getting more into the connoisseur side of obscure stuff rather than the mass market, where revisiting those decades later can provide interesting insight into the gaming market “back when it was good” or at least when people remember it being good in general disdain for “modern gaming”.