Backlog To The Future

Note: this entire post was meant for an audience of one just for laughs and really nothing else but you’re welcome to read it all the same.

Hello, it’s late.

Video games have come to a point where I don’t even quite enjoy them as much not because of some ideological reason but because of the glut that I’ve accurred that leaves me overwhelmed. It’s not as terrible as I put it but then again, it sucks that I went to a buffet and made an unholy altar to gluttony that I now must consume and masticate through - that’s the daunting part.

My slight loss of enjoyment of video games is also because I made the mistake to pay attention to the opinions of people who know nothing about a hobby that then make it their business to opine, for or against, allegedly, the interests of the consumer base because said consumer base happened to have started forming a lucrative, and with that mid witted, subculture both offline and online. I think the death of E3 may have been a good thing although I will miss the pageantry for sure.

And the final reason for the degree of detraction has to do with the fanatics of the hobby that typically, like any other fandom that relates to a hobby related to Japan, I can feel, nay smell, the stupid in the air. I think a standard Speed Stick is in order - starting with myself.

Of course that’s just talking about the consumers. Then there’s the producers that have started to slightly annoy me more than Toyota when they started making crossovers SUVs.

To destroy my idols: some are hacks for writers, some are just prone to brute forcing things, others just make derivative works, and others just make things that don’t make lot of sense.

I don’t blame anyone that happens to have a favorite developer or someone that they deem someone that “gets them” and they in turn get them, but if games are going to be taken seriously as books, theater, films, music, literature, and journalism, then why not take stock in the people that make the video games and scrutinize the process of making the games and people that are behind them, both the hacks and talented.

It’s one thing to tell Todd Howard to tell you “Little Lies” à la Fleetwood Mac but it’s another to just blindly revere Hideo Kojima (something I’m guilty of) and you can’t say there is no accounting for taste when you also believe that video games are some particular art form - a platitude that schizophrenic goal post movers tend to do while projecting their intellectual inadequacies onto others like a certain middle class failure with ass boils.

Personally video games were a distraction and were to be something of limited enjoyment but instead it became something that I could only go for as a focus for prioritization because getting into other hobbies like music, literature, programming, and whatnot were not exactly things I could readily get into because I was focusing on two jobs, with one that proved somewhat useless after 10 years which you can take a guess what it was because all I got from this particular job was just three sheets of paper that I’ve yet to make dividend yields from but boy can I tell you about the wonders of basic bitch web development which I learned on my own between classes!

Anyway, video games were for a long time a relatively cheap hobby to get into and thus easy, and like a McDonald’s cheeseburger, you can bet your bottom dollar that you can’t spell video games without the letters C, H, E, A, P, T, H, R, I, L, L, and S. Another more reputable alternative is to save money to buy a Bently T2 for cheap thrills because at least you’ll likely make your money back sans cost of ownership and base depreciation since automobiles are financial liabilities:

Or better still, buy a brand new, latter-year model of a Gibson Les Paul and keep it in mint condition to sell later as it appreciates. Cheap thrills all the same but I wanted instant gratification and conventionality but as it stands I’m ready to move on.

2020 was the cut off period - almost.

I have only just two reasons, with one being a more reasonable one, for why I’m as guilty as anyone that often complains about why most people continue to buy video games when really the prescription is clear: starve the entire video games industry full stop. And why not? The industry is terrible as it stands and there is nothing worth yet to really help any company to escape from the coming age of holdings companies and investment firms wanting to buy in any intellectual property, believing rightly so that many people that are buying and consuming video games are going to buy anything that is thrown at them if it’s presented in expensive wrapping paper or has a new fresh coat of paint.

It’s like continuing to rent out an apartment in a building that is past 30 years of age and the only reason you continue to rent is because the landlord was kind enough to redo the floors with wood grain floor paneling, did the new bathroom with trinkets and doo-dads from the Home Depot or Lowes and finally topped it off with top-of-the-line plumber’s self-adhesive tape to the kitchen sink piping. Brilliant.

The relationship is abusive, the customer is very much wrong, and you end up with the industry that every poster on every forum on the web, every chatroom of any protocol or service on the internet has ever made about the industry deserves. Why? Because no matter how the cookie crumbles, one way or another, video game consumers, customers, and afficionados must understand something very important: it isn’t so much the company’s fault, it was your fault for continuing to encourage bad products to be made because you kept buying them to start with in the first place.

So I decided to check out from the discord video game servers and stopped going to the imageboard forums because I started to notice the limits to the insights that were provided considering the self-satisfation to their own knowledge and myth-making. So I left, figuring that information that was being disseminated by the companies themselves on places like Twitter, and Nintendo, ever since 2011, has demonstrated that you don’t need a multi-million dollar general public industry exposition to impress people and investors and whatnot to get people excited about the next upcoming game. You just need to throw out a video that can reach people’s smartphones and the throngs of the plebeians will tap their screens to tip and give alms to the catholic church of the Italian plumber, the friars of the Clarendon typefaced icon that is Sony, and the creepy swifts of the Society of Bill Gates.

And much like an annoyed Oliver Cromwell, I’m ready to beat back the figurative church of Rome a bit full stop by deciding to not buy anymore video games. But there were some caveats to this of which there were three.

Buying of the 3DS XL and Nintendo Switch - a business decision.

The first one is that when I decided to put money down on shares of Nintendo American Deposit Receipts (ADR) stock because they’re cheaper than the Japanese stocks which, annoyingly enough, by Japanese government decree, you are to buy at multiples of a 100 shares at once per transaction as a minimum whether you are a Japanese national or a foreigner. And why that annoyingly expensive policy you may ask? Simple: government economic protectionism.

The Japanese economy, like many Asian economies, are not as robust as you may think they are because - and this is true for Japan as it is almost for England, another country based on an island archipelago, is that it has to create wealth through business and financial schemes while supplying money to manufacturing or industrial research and development in order to keep people wanting to keep buying anything stamped with the words “Made in Japan”. Combine this with a strong, motivated, and very underpaid, workforce, and you get some of the most badass guitars that would otherwise cost another one-thousand dollars if made by Americans or European assembly line luthiers!

But I digress: the point is that once I bought a certain amount of stock, I thought to myself, that all is almost forgiven after my disappointment with the Nintendo 64 which made the buying of the 3DS XL and Nintendo Switch something more closer to making sure the company had my money indirectly and directly - the bulk of the money being in equity (shares) than liability (consoles and video game software). There is absolutely nothing genius about this but consider why would someone like Warren Buffet have Coca-Cola as a soft drink served in his expensive investor luncheons and you’ll understand why when you find out that it’s probably because he owns 400 million shares of Coca-Cola stock.

So I bought the console, some games that I am keen on playing in the system with a friend and by myself.

Sticking to old games, mods, studios and indies that move me.

I like finding that one game or two that I can come back over and over to just enjoy with a brain that is mildly turned off. In fact at this point I have a short list of games I can just play right now and it’ll do it for me every time with no additional costs.

The fact is that there is a slew of old games to try out either through emulation or original hardware or independently made games such as Dusk that I can enjoy because they’re going to take me places that although they are rehashes of old concepts but they are taken for a spin in a new conceptual interpretation.

Think of driving a sixteenth generation Toyota Crown, sure it’s a dinky crossover that will never hold a candle to the full-sized sedan as the Camery Solara, but you can’t help but think that “wait a minute? Since when did the Japanese start making American-style smooth suspension?” Cue Teddy Pendergrass’ Love TKO. It’s something to that effect with some independent video games.

I remember when I was playing a game called Armadillo Run, a simple phsysics puzzle game that is still on sale to this day that used OpenGL graphics to achieve it’s physics feats that were very impressive in the early to mid 2000s. The game is still going for a cool $19.99 USD to this day.

I also would rather stick to old games for a simple financial reason: they’re cheap. And before anyone assumes buying the old games outright, I am going to go out and say it: emulation is the surest way to get into older games or remaster and re-releases or just outright piracy.

Besides, you can’t beat Resident Evil 1 on the PC when you know there are modern day mods that are still going strong and are even showcased for you to try out and enjoy. Check out this KendoGunShop Survival Horror Youtube Channel playlist page and the MoDDB Resident Evil page.

There’s also studios that I would rather be faithful to than publishing companies. For one, Remedy is the company that I would rather stick with for any new game that comes out. Sam Lake’s writing is impeccable and when Remedy hired the very beautiful Courtney Hope in Control, I was about ready to start watching old episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful because uncle Sono needs his stories!

All in all, I can get video game kicks on the cheap. There’s also some old games that have been remastered like Personal 4 Golden and Personal 3 PSP. And that’s before I even get to start playing the game of the series that I’m more interested in than the boy band fork of it - I’m talking about none other than the dark Mama Jamma that is Shin Megami Tensei (新女神転生).

The Backlog

A few years ago I wanted to design a XML based markup language that was meant to serve as a backend markup language that you can store a database that then could be used to check off on a web interface all the games that you are playing and then arbitrarily mark off where you are in the progress of the game by measure of precentages (e.g. 10%, 20%, 50%, 75%, 100%). The name of the would be scheme was called Blacklog Markup Language or BLML.

The project ended being stillborn and nothing came of it as I came to realize two things: XML was slow, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) was fast, and the backend would require some serious programming with .NET or something of the like that would’ve been an over engineered effort to serve something that most consumers of video games don’t really do anymore and that’s finish their video games.

So if the efforts were going to wasted on a problem that, really if you want to solve it, it would require something way cheaper: telling people to finish their games and challenging the messy and sporadic manner of playing video games.

What does this have to do with me personally? Simply that if I have a huge amount of games to have to go through, then it’s up to me to organize first the games I’m interested in actually playing, the games that are easy to go over quick as a play detour from the regular schedule - first person shooters are typically easy to get through - and just go through them one game at a time, one game at a time.

This means that multiplayer games with others is out and the focus is the joy of playing a single player game and that’s it.

Santca Simplicitas

There is something to be said about the simplicity of just buying one game at a time and then playing it and then buying the next one. In fact that was, by circumstance of being a kid, the way things were for most people growing up with 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit console systems. And that was because video games were, and still are, just luxury items - the zenith of electronic entertainment technology that was the maraschino cherry on top of the mountain of sundae of plastic toys and games that varied in sports, board games, card games, books, dolls, action figures, bicycles, skateboards, scooters, scatter jacks, playing cards, pogs, and many other novelties and things that gave children a place to play, learn, and develop their brains and minds while socializing with other kids.

The point of the video game was to be a stationary, mental activity that challenged the mind in a way that the rest, mostly physical activities, challenged in some less concentrated way. But it played itself as part of an array of diversions - albeit an expensive one that most didn’t understand or care until it was finally making sense becuase their friends and family were starting to get into video games and, on the business side of things, for it to be profitable to eclipse other previous entertainment industries and economies considering the multi-disciplinary effort that it takes for making sometimes a video game although there is an argument against the design ethos of “everything but the kitchen sink” video game development as not everything needs to be a cinematic experience nor have be an overengineered concept. But that’s neither here or there for this prose.

The point is that by simply, stopping my buying new games, sticking to what I know I can pick up and almost intuitively go through easily, while taking care later of the games that I don’t care much for or would find the need to mentally develop a “taste” and skillset for, will be the winning formula to finally get through my collection accrued.

After all of this what will be next? Maybe music. It’s overdue of a hobby to move on to.

Cue the ending theme!