Viewing entries tagged
casual
There are so many genres in gaming that it stands to reason how none of us will be one hundred percent familiar with every single one of them. In fact, I think if we were all a little honest and reflective about what we're into, the diversity and eclectic aspect of our tastes would be relatively limited. I'm no different, but I think the key to remaining open to things outside of our usual wheelhouse is to always be willing to give something new a try.
Generally speaking, art has the ability to teach us so much about the world and the diversity of human experience, and games are no different. In fact, games offer that special kind of interactivity that allows us to experience the foreign, or the unknown, while putting a little more of ourselves into the subject itself.
Couch co-op games have never really been a big thing in my gaming life, simply because I'm very rarely in the position where I have someone to share the couch (and the game) with in the first place. Although I tried my best when I was younger, always attempting to get my friends playing NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat as much as I could, but to no avail. In fact, the most I've ever played any couch co-op with anyone else has been with the golf game: Tiger Wood's PGA Tour 11. I mean, anything is more fun with friends, so I eventually learned to take what I could get and play whatever those around me were interested in.
I'm usually quite sceptical of subscription services of any form, as it usually benefits the service a lot more than the subscriber. However, since I entered the world of Xbox and Microsoft GamePass, I have to admit that I've been pleasantly surprised with the rotations of games on offer. Not least because I've ended up playing a bunch of new little indie games that I might have missed if I weren't paying attention to the GamePass library.
Does every game need to be pushing the limits of the medium and creating original and innovative experiences? Clearly the answer is: no. In a world where the big budget games show up every year with the latest and greatest in technical fidelity, and countless little indie projects are released every single day with weird and wonderful takes on what a video game can actually become. I now attempt to answer the question, whether or not there's still room for a game that doesn't do a whole lot of anything at all.
I'm not a fan of deck-building games at the best of times. I never got into Magic The Gathering, or Pokémon, or any other form of Collectible Card Games, or Trading Card Games at any point in my life. The closest I ever got was collecting basketball cards in primary school, because literally everyone collected basketball cards at my primary school.
There are some genres that I never expect to surprise me, but that's okay. When it comes to sports and racing games, there isn't a lot of room to move, as we all have some kind of understanding about what we're going to get. So when a little racing game comes along and finds a unique identity between arcade and simulation, it deserves to be noticed.
The world of mobile ports to other platforms is often fraught with bad controls, poor optimisation, and a long list of other complaints that make them barely worth considering. Often it's because the process adds a bunch of clunky patches in an effort to make it work, while ultimately distilling out the very thing that made it fun in the first place.
