March 23, 2020
In the months before this I was hardly playing games, outside of work I mean. I always felt too tired & restless to really commit to anything.
The first one I'm playing a lot of now is the one everyone else is, the game that swept in on Friday, just in the nick of time to save us from staring at the wall for 18 hours a day, contemplating the failures of our adult lives and the time-lapse decay of everything around us. I'm actually surprised at how much this Animal Crossing feels like the GameCube game (and the DS game) that occupied so much of my time as a kid. The threats and the pressure are still minimal. It feels like unique events happen with more frequency, but maybe I'm just better at video games now. It's still about going slow in a friendly, verdant world with some silly animals, playing dress up and house. The biggest design difference is that systems and events that I previously had to learn about from online guides or serendipitously are now teased with an all-encompassing achievement-like rewards system, making the various unlocks and upgrades more explicit and quantitative, and ensuring that fans and newcomers do everything there is to do in the game before the first major update adds even more. This doesn't feel as onerous as I thought it would, and maybe I'm just complaining about not being bored enough.
The other game I'm really sinking my teeth into is Death Stranding. I was excited for it for a long time, but only just got a PS4 last week. Maybe it's a little too apt for the moment. It's a game about rebuilding a land formerly known as America that's riddled with enormous craters. The people that are left are holed up in "cities" that, on the surface, look like bombed out, flooded husks. Force fields and automated monitoring systems protect the husks from rain that ages everything and swarms of carnivorous ghosts. No one can go outside. Player progress is measured in social media "likes" from other players and NPCs. There's a button to yell out across the craggy landscape, but you'll either hear only an echo, or a faint response from someone who sounds like you. Early in the game a man tells you that before the Stranding, America was a land where people could move freely.
Also I've been slowly learning the basics of SkullGirls. My PSN handle is A_Lovely_Duck if you ever wanna kick my ass, and my Nintendo friend code is SW-0830-4186-5617.