plaincrispz

[plaincrispz]

twenty-five-year-old man threatens internet with ‘blog’ and ‘immediate pivot to video’

I was going to open this post with the sentence ‘I’m pretty sure I have a mental illness’. This is funny because I undoubtedly have a mental illness (maybe several!). But the one I’m referring to here is that I simply cannot stop buying video games on Steam and then not playing them. The list below is 92 items long and by my reckoning I am /done/ with about seven of the games on it (and I didn’t even play Chrono Trigger on Steam, I played it on my DS in 2010 and then bought it simply because it was like $5 and my understanding of the value of money is apparently extremely limited. My DS copy is in a drawer about two metres away from where I am typing out this post.).

There are several reasons why this list of games I’ve bought and barely played is so long! But there are also several counterpoints as to why I am going to defeat these reasons in hand-to-hand combat. 

The first reason is that for the past... two years (or more) I have been deeply obsessed with the bad video game Overwatch. I’ve played it for more than a thousand hours! That’s a lot of hours! You might be thinking ‘but hey, Michael, buddy, didn’t the beta for Overwatch 2 just come out?! How are you going to stop playing Overwatch? I personally have no faith in you! I would spit on you in the street!’ and that’s fair enough. The main reason I’m going to stop playing (read: probably still play a couple of times a week because it’s like crack to me) is because the game is simply ‘not very fun’ at the moment. The developers made changes that make the game feel like playing a deathmatch mode in Call of Duty and if I wanted to play that I would straight up just play Call of Duty instead. My feelings about this specific issue could quite literally go on for upwards of ten thousand words so I will simply leave this reason as ‘Overwatch 2 currently sucks and it bums me out to play it’ for now! 

The reason the list is so long in the first place is because -- and this may shock you -- I really like video games. So much so that I’m at university to learn how to make my own. For a while, out of some weird shame, I told myself that it was a story thing -- I only liked video games as a medium to tell stories. I mean, I do like them as a storytelling medium, but what I like more are things like the gliding mechanic in A Short Hike, the representation of using the internet in 2008-2011 in Emily is Away, and the need to be both frantic and precise when running through a level in Neon White. The list is so long because I want to play a huge variety of games -- I don’t want to lock myself into only playing one game (anymore). Making video games is a creative pursuit, obviously, and like a lot of creative pursuits the best ideas are born from consuming media widely. If you want to write well, you need to be reading from a wide variety of sources. To make anything you need to know what’s possible. I have every intention of playing through every game on this list to whatever constitutes completion -- or to develop an actual reason why I don’t want to play it anymore. 

This brings me to the overarching point of this blog. I’ve had to make some videos for school recently, and I’d never really done that before. I found the process pretty compelling. A lot of the video game content I like watching on YouTube falls in the middle (or at least feels like it does) of fully scripted and completely off the cuff -- sort of bouncing off of major talking points about a game, but not being afraid to stray away on a tangent. I also want to start streaming more consistently (rather than an average of like twice a year...) and this is a pretty good excuse to do just that. 

I also just chucked all of these items into a random picker website and it chose Moonglow Bay as my first game. Tomorrow (the 5th of July, also known as ‘America’s Hangover’(i think)) at like 10am AEST time I’m gonna stream the first few hours of the game over at twitch.tv/catslikeplaincrisps. Maybe I’ll even post about it on my social media channels! Wow!

The Big Con

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Bloons TD 6

A Boy and His Blob

Braid

Brendan Keogh’s Putting Challenge 

Cave Story

Celeste

Chrono Trigger

Cloudpunk

Control

Costume Quest

Cyberpunk 2077

Death Stranding

Death’s Door

Deep Rock Galactic

Dicey Dungeons

Disco Elysium

Disgaea 1

Divinity: Original Sin II

Doki Doki Literature Club 

Donut County

Doom

Elder Scrolls V

Emily is Away

Enslaved

Final Fantasy IV

Final Fantasy XV

Firewatch

Florence

Frog Detective

Frog Detective 2

FTL

Gato Roboto

Gunfire Reborn

Hades

Half Life

Half Life 2

Hollow Knight

Hotline Miami

I Am Dead

Ikenfell

Katamari Damacy

Lake

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead 2

Metal Gear Solid V

Minit

Mirror’s Edge

Moonglow Bay 

Moonlighter

N++

Necrobarista

Neon White

Nier Automata

No Longer Home

Omori

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Outer Wilds

Oxenfree

Persona 4 Golden

Pine

Portal

Portal 2

Risk of Rain 2

Rumu

Sam and Max Save the World

Saturday Morning RPG

Scarlet Nexus

A Short Hike

Slay the Spire

Spelunky 2

Starbound

Stardew Valley

Streets of Rogue

Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy Forever

Tacoma

Tales of Symphonia

Terraria

Thomas Was Alone

Titanfall 2

Umurangi Generation

Undertale

Valheim

Void Bastards

Wargroove

We Happy Few

Webbed

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Witcher 3

Yakuza 0