Hey everyone. This is my third Saturday in a row that I've written a blog, and I think I want to try to do a weekly blog from here on out. So, I want to change up the format a bit. Instead of just writing a blog as topics come about, I'm going to attempt to incorporate topics into one weekly blog at the end of the week called The Loot Box. We'll see how it goes. So, welcome to The Loot Box!
We'll start with what I've been doing gaming wise. Believe it or not, I'm still playing Yoshi's Crafted World and still enjoying it. I've been taking my time with it, though. It's harder to just sit down and play for hours on end anymore, so I get an hour or two in a night. When I am playing, I'm spending the extra time trying to 100% the levels. This means getting all the flowers, the red coins, finding all the poochies and souvenirs. On the upside, it means you're getting a lot of mileage out of these levels, but on the downside, it's stretching out a game I wish had more levels. Don't get me wrong, Yoshi's Crafted World has a ton of levels; it's just the novelty of repeatedly revisiting them is beginning to wear a bit thin for me.
I believe I mentioned in a previous blog that I've set a goal for myself for 2019 by only buying one game a month. This is going to help me not only save money but finally get to work on my backlog. It really needs to happen... This also means I'm going to miss out on a ton of upcoming games. I already had to pass on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in favor of Yoshi's Crafted World. This month, I was planning on buying Cuphead for Switch, but a friend of mine talked me into buying Borderlands: The Handsome Collection to play co-op. Unfortunately, I just realized I bought my game for the month of April... Oh well.. Maybe I'll buy Cuphead next month. I wonder what will come out next month that I'll want more, though. But hey, look at it this way! By passing up on Sekiro and Cuphead, I not only saved myself money from breaking controllers and consoles, but probably extended my lifespan by several years!
Speaking of Sekiro, games like Sekiro and the Souls games have been responsible for an ugly side of the gaming community: the "git gud" mentality. I HATE that phrase and anyone who uses it. I think I already talked about this in a previous blog before, so I won't go any further. I do want to say that I read an article on GameSpot about how Nintendo uses luck to help make multiplayer games more fun. There was a lot of comments from angry gamers balking at the idea of making games more fun for less skilled gamers. There was actually a book that was referenced in the article called The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst, and it discusses behaviors exactly like what was being described in the comments. I haven't started the book yet, but I'm hoping it'll be an interesting read and not something written from a one-sided perspective by someone who doesn't understand video games. The subtitle "Why Gaming Culture is the Worst" is causing me to be a bit suspect. We'll see.
So a couple of interesting things that happened this week were exposes of Anthem and Prince Henry wanting to ban Fortnite. Now, it's no surprise that Anthem was very badly handled, but just how much of a mess it was turned out to be more alarming than usual. Anthem is yet another example of what happens when AAA games become too ambitious by development teams that lack proper management and structure and publishers that apply more pressure making things worse and further complicating matters by trying to milk gamers with microtransactions and promises of upcoming content. Look, I'm all for gamers having different tastes and whatnot, and what they spend their time and money on is really nothing of my concern, but Anthem really bothers me. To me, it's objectively a bad game, yet there are a lot of gamers out there that somehow defend it. They clearly take no issue with playing a game that yields very little interesting rewards with extremely monotonous missions. I don't get it... aren't there better games they want to play instead? What is it about Anthem that causes them to believe in it so much?
Now on to Prince Henry. He thinks Fortnite should be banned. I'll be the first to admit my dislike for the game becomes of its tremendous influence among young gamers, but because I believe in freedom of expression, I cannot believe that any game should ever be banned, no matter how bad, how offensive, or how addicting. Fortnite has a right to exist regardless of what we think, and 250 million gamers find some value in it. What Prince Henry doesn't understand is that it's up to parents to step in and moderate their children's game time so they don't become addicts. That's how it was when I was growing up. I've seen this argument for nearly 30 years now. Governments always try to link something bad to video games, always wanting to control them, but never expend the energy to inform parents to be more involved in their children's lives. So as much as I dislike Fortnite, because it's now a target of a government who wants to ban it, I'm going to root for it. Good luck, Henry. You're going to need it.
I just want to give you guys a heads up about blogs in the future. Some will be short, like this one. Others might be longer. It all depends on the time I have to write. But I WILL commit to getting something up for you guys every Saturday. Until then, look forward to the next Loot Box!
No comments:
Post a Comment