I wrote recently about how I couldn't log in to The Crew despite the fact that the servers are supposed to be up for two more months. On the plus side I did finally get in. On the downside it wasn't just a bad game, which I expected, but a game that gave me a shot of existential angst, which I did not expect.

Before I start I'd like to note that while I wrote recently that I haven't been enjoying games much recently, I don't think that's what this is. I actually have been having a decent time with a few titles, notably Brotato and Live-A-Live. I wouldn't say that gaming has fully rebounded for me, but this is not a "video games are giving me angst" situation. This is specifically about The Crew.

So why is The Crew specifically provoking this reaction?

Part of it is that it's an old game. The Crew is almost a decade old and while I wouldn't call it retro (and it never will be retro because it's being taken down) it is of a time. I'm playing on Xbox Series X but it hasn't had any upgrades for newer hardware so you can definitely see its age in things like very low resolution on far away buildings and just general texture and graphics quality. There are games from 2014 that still hold up visually today but The Crew is not one of them.

Beyond the age of the graphics, though, there's the game's design and attitude. It's one of those "street racer" you're a criminal on the run from the law racing games that was popular in the mid to late 2000s. That subgenre still exists today in games like Need for Speed Unbound, but while that game is colorful and stylized, The Crew is grim and coated in grime like a game from 2010. It starts out with a bunch of cliche gang and cop stuff, and all the UI elements and menus are intended to look "street." Even in 2014, which is post Forza Horizon 2, this was pretty outdated and The Crew got called out for it at the time. It's one of the reasons the game didn't review well, scoring a 61 on Metacritic. I played through Need for Speed: The Run in November 2020 and while I did not like that game much I thought it at least did a very similar story in a less off-putting way. Maybe I've just gotten less tolerant of these things in the last 3+ years.

But while The Crew is and always was kind of a bad game, its the combination of its age and that badness that hit me right in the feels. See, when The Crew came out I was in my early 30s and I was a different person, including when it came to video games. I loved them with an intense passion and I could enjoy almost any game of any quality, at least for awhile. Video games were something I rewarded myself with at the end of the day, or played early in the morning just to start things off with a little burst of pleasure. And it almost didn't matter what game it was. I played a lot of bad games and if I didn't always like them I always found them interesting.

Now...it doesn't work that way. Now a game like The Crew just feels like a chore. This isn't true of all games. Despite my current malaise I have found myself wanting to play a quick Brotato run several times over the last week. This morning when I woke up I did a run and everything clicked in my build and I beat a new difficulty level. That was fun and satisfying. Last night I felt drawn to finish the Japan story in Live-A-Live and that was reasonably engaging.

But playing The Crew just hit...bad. Like biting into an apple and finding it mealy and half rotten. Like pulling clothes from the dryer only to find they are still damp. Like racing to catch your train and making it, only to have it stop on the tracks for 20 minutes for no reason.

Not only did I not enjoy the 40 minutes or so that I played of The Crew but it made me think back to all that time I sunk into mediocre games in the past and feel bad about that too. What was I even doing? Why did I play Dante's Inferno in 2019? At the time I kind of enjoyed it, but would I today? Why did I play both Medal of Honor 2010 and Medal of Honor Warfighter? How much of my life have I wasted playing these crappy games?

A lot. I've wasted a lot of my life playing crappy games.

Now to be fair this is something I've been grappling with for some time. Ever since 2021, when I finished both Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood and Balan Wonderworld I've been rethinking my relationship with bad or mediocre games. Last year I barely played any. And I wouldn't have booted up The Crew if the servers weren't coming down and I didn't feel like it would be a waste to not at least try the game I paid for before it becomes inaccessible forever. But I did boot it up and my reaction wasn't "oh this is better than I thought" or "I see what people were saying but this is okay" or even "well this is bad but sort of interesting." It was "what am I doing with my life and why am I doing it? Why did I ever do it?"

There is an obvious answer to this. Stop playing The Crew. Delete it. Move on. Ignore the sunk cost fallacy and start another story in Live-A-Live, a game that hasn't hooked me like Super Mario Bros Wonder did, but isn't a bad way to spend a couple hours from time to time. It's the obvious answer and it's correct. I probably won't follow it, at least immediately, because I do have that clock ticking away on the servers, but in the end my life won't be affected much whether I do or don't spend 20 hours to finish The Crew.

The depressing part is the recognition that my feelings on games really have changed. I can still enjoy good games but bad ones just aren't doing it for me. This isn't a new revelation but The Crew really hit it home. It's a game that I'd always meant to play, always intended to check out if only to make fun of it, and I missed my window. There are a lot of other games like that too. I still like some games but I don't like all games anymore, and I have to be more selective. I look at something like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and I used to think "I should wait for a sale on that because it will be dumb fun or at least interesting." But the truth is...I just shouldn't bother. I should find something else, whether a game or not, to do with that time.

And this wouldn't be a huge deal except...games were my last reliable escape. During my life I've turned to a few different things to cope with stress or disappointment, both of which I have a lot of right now. Some of those things I've cut out because they were self-destructive. Gaming can also be self-destructive, but is at least fine in moderation. It was the final thing I could turn to when I just really needed to get out of my head for a bit. To find that it no longer really works that way, or at least not reliably is...rough. Last night I was scrolling through some of the PS3 games streamable through PS+ and I saw a few games I'd always meant to get to like Rogue Warrior and the Kareteka remake (the PS3 version not the new Digital Eclipse one.) But I don't really want to play those games anymore. They're bad. I've played enough bad games.

When you're young you look at older people whose tastes have changed and say "that won't happen to me." People who stopped playing games altogether not because life made it impossible (which can easily happen) but because they lost interest. People whose musical tastes shifted from edgy and loud to softer and boring. People who have lost touch with the things they loved. What you don't realize is that these taste changes happen organically and they happen whether you want them to or not. You just see things differently as you age. Things affect you differently. You get to a point where you've played a dozen racing games with the same set up and you see some fuzzy low res background element and you ask "why am I even doing this?" and there is no good answer. Things become not fun anymore. You've seen it too many times.

I'll be fine. I can adjust to my new way of interacting with games. I can become more discerning. I can just not play The Crew. I've not played The Crew successfully for years and it worked out great. There are plenty of actually good games in my backlog and coming out every week. There's other stuff to do. But that moment when I loaded up The Crew for the first time after trying for weeks and it just...sucked was a real moment of clarity for me. My old ways don't work anymore. I need new ones.

First, sorry to hear you're still feeling this way. My instinct is usually to attempt to offer encouragement or advice, but I don't think they'd be useful here. I hope you either find something that does reignite your passion (which it sounds like the two games you listed have done, to a minor degree) or find something different that gives the good brain zaps.

I think the biggest change in this way for me has been that I almost never replay older games anymore. I used to get really excited to start a new game of a single-digit Final Fantasy on a Friday night, or begin a new run of the original Mass Effect trilogy, or even attempt to beat the entire campaign of an older Heroes of Might and Magic game. Most of the reason I dropped this habit was having kids, but I tried to break into both FF8 and Chrono Cross again last year, figuring they were pretty benign things to play when the kids were calm. I lost interest in both fairly quickly, despite calling them two of my all-time favorites. I think I'm at peace with that; I've milked just about every experience I could out of both, and there are so many other things to do nowadays.

Music has also evolved for me, although it's mostly that every place I used to get my recommendations from has closed up shop or changed how they cover things. Maybe for the latter, they felt the same way you described, and the old way of coverage was getting depressing for them.

@allthedinos: Thanks. Yeah I don't really think I need advice because I think the best advice would be "go back in time 10 years" which isn't feasible, or develop a different perspective which is part of why I wrote this blog.

I was never one to replay old games, but I think somewhat similarly my ability to play older games on my backlog (like The Crew) has somewhat diminished. I can still get excited about some of them; interestingly enough PS1 games seem like they're still in my wheelhouse, but I bounce off many of them much harder than I used to. I think that the underlying issues are somewhat similar, in that I've wrung a lot of the "juice" out of those old experiences. Old racing games tend to be pretty similar, and I actually ended up having the same stupid experience in The Crew that I did in NFS: The Run when I beat a race I was going to lose because my opponent T-boned some random traffic quite stupidly. How many times is that experience going to be compelling? Eventually you've just kind of seen it all before. Newer games at least have shiny visuals and try new things. My favorite game last year was Tears of the Kingdom, and while that game has issues it also brought a lot of novelty with it. It did things I'd never seen or done before, and that helped make it compelling.

I've given up on my musical tastes awhile ago. I still do find new songs that I like and new artists so I'm not entirely in old man nostalgia mode, but a lot of the newer stuff strikes me as just...fine. I can't identify anything in it that makes me shake my fists at the clouds with anger, but it doesn't get my heart racing in the same way. Ironically one of my music discovery mechanisms used to be video game soundtracks, but I feel like they've fallen way off. Tony Hawk and Grand Theft Auto helped define my musical taste, and the Forza Horizon games introduced me to a lot of new artists too. Forza Horizon 5 had some decent stuff but nothing that really moved me. Other than that I can't really remember a game with a great licensed soundtrack in many years. I guess extreme sports games don't exist anymore and I play a lot fewer racing games. But I think in general there are just fewer licensed soundtracks floating around, and those that do exist are often older stuff. Hi-Fi Rush for all its focus on music had big geezer energy. Rhythm games tend to have their own soundtracks or use game OSTs (like Theatrhythm or the Persona rhythm games) instead of newer licensed stuff.

I'm old.

So far the music in The Crew has been aggressively bad but apparently there are multiple radio stations so maybe some of the other ones have stuff I might like? I see a few tracks that I like. I do wish that newer games would do a better job of introducing me to new music, though. Maybe GTA VI, though GTA V's soundtrack was...not good.

I went back to The Crew tonight just to give it a try under a different mindset. I found it...tolerable. It's the experience I expected from the game. An older, open world, racing game with an annoying story and a lot of attitude but also a large map to get lost in, some nice environmental details, and a functional driving model.

I wouldn't say it's a good game. It earned its average score of around 60. One mission had me trying to smash into another car to subdue it while bouncing over a bunch of dunes and it was legitimately one of the most frustrating things I've done in gaming in awhile. Even the missions that weren't frustrating were kind of boring. And it crashed on me after an hour. But there are times on the open road just driving when it's chill and pleasant. I remember a lot of people at the time saying that the best parts of the game were just driving through its world like a road trip. I can see that.

And the music did get better.

Now instead of feeling depressed about the game itself I'm upset again about it being taken down. The fact that I hated it so much the first time and thought it was okay the second just shows how much mood can affect your relationship to a game. And the reason why I like to collect games and play them when I'm in the right mood. Now with the Crew admittedly we've had about 10 years...this is not Babylon's Fall, but it doesn't HAVE to be this way. It doesn't have to be online only. Forza Horizon has shown that. And I didn't want to do any online stuff. I just wanted to cruise and explore and take things at my own pace. That's where The Crew has value. For the next two months. Until it's gone forever.