Explain Yourself! Number Three

Yeah, so I fell off the horse. What better time to hop back on than the present though! And if you wind up missing me, you can catch my editorial presence and occasional appearances on Hardcore Gaming 101's Top 47,858 of All Time Podcast, available at your local podcast vendor! Tomorrow the lads rank Sonic '06 and Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman, meaning some good people were forced to play Sonic '06. Honor their sacrifices, and subscribe today!

So, in the last...four months, I suppose...I've continued down some truly dark and demented roads. Rather than go into truly exhaustive detail, I'll provide the actual highlights of my debauched career in the curation, collection, and completion of various video game things.

I played and beat Gone Home.

Gone Home is, by about thirteen miles, the best of the so-called "walking simulator" genre I've had the chance to play. I think it is useful to explain that my frame of reference for these sorts of games are Proteus and Dear Esther. The former, I found to be an enjoyable but barely interactive light show. That it basically runs on a sub-one hour timer before ending the game for you plays to its strengths, and the limited choices presented to the player elevate it beyond screen saver territory. Esther, on the other hand, was a two hour slog and one of my least favorite things acquired in my Humble Bundle fever days (as proof, note its position on my very official list here). You walk a mopey man up a cliff for what feels like a century, he jumps off. Dire shit.

And then on what seems like the opposite end of a spectrum covering these sorts of deliberate, slow paced, contemplative games, you have something as clever as Gone Home. Just the range of conversations that stem from this game alone elevate it into some lofty territory. It's a walking sim with progress gated by the acquisition of Parish-esque "oddly-shaped keys", one that uses as familiar a space as a craftsman to tell a steadily unfolding story about the inner workings of a family in the mid-90s. It tells the story of a young woman coming to terms with her own sexuality through well-delivered voice logs and cleverly dispersed mise-en-scene. It has a supernatural B-plot (or C-plot, depending on how interested you get in the various other threads you're free to tug at while exploring). There's scads of riot girl tapes hidden around the house, and as the sort of person who eagerly awaits the next drop from riotgrrlberlin.tumblr.com, I can barely convey to you how fucking great these tapes are.

I wasn't really party to the sort of tribal Internet wars around this game when it came out, but I would have probably said even upon its release that there is plenty of space in the video game community for experiences like Gone Home. It's a game with no real conflict, one with a story which you could very well ignore and obtain a "win state" in ten minutes, and one which explores subjects like queerness and healthy relationships at various life stages. To those who would say these sorts of stories and games have no place in the hobby, I call bull. Not only is there space for purely narrative games like this, but I'd even say this is a shining example of story telling in video games. Even if you wind up not enjoying the thing, the entire game is probably four hours long if you are exhaustive in your exploration. I cannot recommend it enough, and would consider it essential reading from the last five years.

I made my video game pilgrimage to Japan.

Specifically, I spent a week on Okinawa with my brother in the Air Force. Therein I did fish a few tuna out of the open ocean on a chartered boat, eat various things, tour downtown Naha and the more rustic central parts of the island...oh, and I bought some fucking video game ass video games.

It is a miracle that I only spent about $250 on electronics there, across a few different shops. Some chain electronics shops had used games alongside newer titles. GEO was my main squeeze in this department; and it was where I stumbled upon Rhythm Tengoku and one of the GBA Famicom rereleases. But if you're not looking to fuck around, and want to find a place to dig for hours on end for some buys, get your ass to Manga Souko in Awase. I could have spent another two hours in there digging for treats. The bulk of what is photographed to the left came from one sweet, sweet shopping trip to this Valhalla.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with my Raid. Also I would strongly recommend Okinawa as your final destination in Japan. I grew up on Oahu for a few years as a teenager, and even an hour after landing I was experiencing waves of nostalgia for that place. I live in the Seattle area so I am not lacking for views of the Pacific Ocean, but it is quite different being on an island where the coast is visible from damn near any point. I wouldn't say the trip was cheap, but you could do a hell of a lot worse than the $700 round trip I paid for round trip airfare. Food is reasonably priced, especially if you're willing to get the hell out of Naha (which is basically Honolulu) and kick it in some izakayas. You've better odds of finding folks willing to accommodate your English on the south end of the island, due in no small part to the enormous amount of American service folks stationed there and the mushrooming "service sector" establishments built around the bases to provide assorted comforts to these paragons of virtue.

I had a hell of a good time during my trip abroad, and cannot wait to file down the lock out pegs on my SNES for some Tetris Battle Gaiden, soft-mod a Wii for Captain Rainbow, and learn enough Japanese to take a fair stab at Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.

I haven't played a video game in twenty days.*

Beyond the unavoidable truth that summers in the Pacific Northwest are without fail the best in the continental United States, the truth is I've had this coming for a while. In 2012, a year I don't look back on with much fondness, I turned to video games as a coping mechanism for dealing with depression and stress that stemmed from grad school being very much not what I had hoped. While the upshot was I have managed to beat 180 or so video games in the last 66 months, as well as land an actual paying gig in the video games industry (see the top of this blog entry for details), I'm convinced I've put video games over other activities for a while. So, I have taken the month off. I'm 20 days clear as of today.

*The exceptions were a foray into a new local arcade where, almost out of pity, I put a quarter into a MAME cabinet and played some pirated DoDonPachi; and a host at a house party asked that I try Thumper in VR. Thumper in VR is very, very good.

Turns out, there are scads of things to do that aren't playing video games. I've been catching up reading out of the piles of books on shelves and in my Nook. My partner and I have a healthy rivalry going in the fantastic board game, Jaipur. I took a trip out to Denver and central Colorado, and not worrying about where my 3DS was at any given point was a nice change from my usual travel flow. I've spent less on video game related shit this month than I have in a while. I've gotten corners of the house organized that I haven't touched in ages. Soon I'll be bottling my second batch of mead and my first batch of homemade strawberry-rhubarb wine. Later this month I've got a camping date with my boo, who has joined me in this video game abstention for the month (mainly depriving her of Horizon). I've watched some television and films, which were frankly hard things to stomach when my overwhelming preference was to play a damn game on the television over sitting and staring at it with no interaction.

Honestly, after the first week of feeling like I was "losing time" by not playing stuff to clear it from my backlog, all that's really left now is a rekindled excitement to play anything. Video games had become something I was doing almost out of obligation...and sometimes literally so, as I am made to play some games to contribute to the podcast I help produce. I'm now to the point where I miss video games, and that's something I haven't felt in a very long time.

Two conclusions, however.

1) In future, if/when I decide to do this again, I'm probably only committing to a fortnight away from video games.

2) I'm probably (read: 100% fucking guaranteed) going to take some paid time off in August to play the everliving shit out of Breath of the Wild.