Skill Issue, The

State of the Newsletter address

I'm playing at being a games journalist, but I'm currently actively loathing video games. They're still cool, and this is still the enthusiasm newsletter, but fuck me if the state of games, and my own dexterity issues stopping me from enjoying the games I want to play most, don't make me want to sell my earthly possessions and live in a cave. 

Geoff Keighley [redacted], and even if he wasn't [redacted], I would still have resented watching this year's Game Awards presentation, because of its nailed-on tendency to pre-anoint a video game to win the vast chunk of its shiny, narrow awards like 'best RPG' and 'game of the year' (the 'game of the year', if a role-playing game, is going to be the 'best RPG'), while notional stuff like 'best art direction' and 'best sound design' is quickly swept aside so your man can make Muppets, The embarrassing again and give overtures about independent game development after having undermined and shunned the Future Class, a cohort of young game developers he brought into the Game Awards fold for clout. 

Stuff like this reminds me of when I wrote for somewhere, and the editor said, 'no, you can't criticise [person], I'm having lunch with them next week'; it's good to be able to write out that Keighley is the worst choice of organiser and presenter of an event designed to give games some mainstream press (and sell you things, obviously). I liked the Divinity trailer, it was Wicker Man as fuck. It's also going to be turn-based, so I'm into it.

The other thing that's making me reconsider being a video games person is that I'm hyperaware at the moment that game controllers are not designed for me, and that, no matter how much I press on and use them unmodified, I struggle with them very much, can't really play games 'well', and it lessens my tolerance for the pain and discomfort that, for me, comes with the hobby. 

I'm investigating products from Evil Controllers; gamepads adapted to be used with one hand, and also the 8BitDo Lite SE (which, against the spirit of accessibility, is two products; one for Android, Switch and Mobile, and another Xbox-branded option for PC and Series consoles), so we'll see. I am feeling overwhelmed by the fact that I’m so often just not dextrous enough to finish games now; I'm not interested in Housemarque's new one Saros because I couldn't beat the second boss in Returnal; there's no point. I would find bullet hells and fighting games to be super fun if I could control them well, and though I'm spending time and money testing out various solutions to this, it's entirely possible that I just... won't be able to? It's draining.

I'm also feeling drained because of various annoyances I've been running into with game-adjacent technology, and it's making me believe that all technology was a mistake. It turns out that the 8BitDo Pro 3 controller, which I've reviewed on here previously, will not stay paired to my Android phone; it works great on Windows, SteamOS, and Switch, but I have to re-pair it to my Android phone every time I turn it on, and it's a pain. This doesn't bode very well for the AYN Thor I've ordered (I regret to inform you) that should be here on the other side of 2030.

The reasons I have to be cheerful about video games this month include the revelation that getting creative with the power of dual-lock velcro could make gaming on the bus, via portables such as the AYN Thor, a reality for me, a person with hemiplegia. The controller issues still make me want to bash my head off, but we're getting somewhere. Though I'm currently stuck meditating over the fact that action-y, button-mashy games, no matter how much I like the idea of them, are not designed for me, I'm also enjoying some low-dexterity games that don't require every button on the controller, and it's making me cool off from the idea of never playing a video game ever again.

Going forward, I think there's mileage in making 2026 the year of the backlog, because there are too many games and I own enough of them and having a website to which to write about them on is quite a good way of clearing it. The whole reason this website exists is because I wanted a reason to actually sit down and play video games, and I seem to have lost sight of that in favour of treating it as an excuse to buy shit that I don't need and that doesn't make me happier or enrich my life in any meaningful way. BACKLOG YEAR, with the occasional theme thrown in. 

And Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. is still our cozy video game correspondent, unshackled by my minimalist pretensions, so there's every chance a new game will end up in here this year by proxy. I also reserve the right to review magic school (like sorcery, not like card tricks) life simulation Witchbrook when it comes out this year. It got delayed from Winter 2025 and now it's just slated for '2026', just to ruin my plans. But if I buy one game instead of 200, that's still a step up and I'll take the win.

I should spend this year going through the games that I got review copies for in a former life that I never got around to covering in any form at the time. I did attempt some early pieces for this website about games I got code for, but they didn't really have that 'video games enthusiasm' throughline that I'm very proud that this website has. I credit Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. for shaping my writing for this website, after she sent me her highly personal take on Spiritfarer, and how it informed and gave her strength in a gloomy point in her life. She made me realise that personal writing isn't a bad thing, and that us being a video game 'blog' is just fine. The occasional delusion of grandeur sets in occasionally about making this be a proper website with contributors and features, but it's one step at a time, and also; I worry that trying to go further with it will broaden it out and make it lose the personal element. 

I don't really have great thoughts about where the games industry is going, beyond that I don't really have an interest in soft-soaping a Japanese man or Phil Spencer, just because you're having lunch with them next week. I don't want to talk to them. Not a lot of video game websites accept pitches that are just 'here are my thoughts on this game', so I don't do a lot of writing for those people unless something really incenses me. Even then, I get told that 'we already have a writer doing accessibility stuff' (accessibility is not a one-size-fits-all thing). I'm not made to write about the industry, and I don't have any abiding interest in it as it falls to pieces, so I'm just not going to, and if writing 'I like this game because' isn't marketable, fine.

This year, then, if I keep to my promise, will see me covering games that I've bought and not played in the fifteen years that I've had a Steam account, as a way to distract myself from my poor impulse control, which I feel like has overwhelmed and swallowed me whole. I'm writing this as the 2025 Winter Sale is on, and I have not partook and will not partake. And because I'm feeling kind of down about my own dexterity as a person with hemiplegia, this month's loose theme is me doing some writing about low dexterity, low-effort video games, and quite possibly some writing about the high dexterity games that have driven me up the wall. It's not really the fault of those games. It's not my fault, either. It's just life.

Thank you.

In between me writing this and you seeing it, my laptop died, so I've bought another one. But this was all in 2025, so my 2026 is still going to be minimalist. I'm quite a hubristic person, so if I write next month that I've spent the last of the chips on some other useless machine, then yeah, it's on me. Elsewhere, my 'taking stock of the year' moment has been looking back on the RAM that I bought on eBay and refunded thinking that I didn't need it and that it would be a waste of money. HO-HO.

Loddlenaut first impressions (2023, Moon Lagoon, PC) 

You're a person in a diving suit with a handler directing you as you use a beam to clean up coral reefs in the aftermath of a corporation having done some kind of capitalism-dozy. So far the handler is acting very incredulous; 'I wonder what they needed with this massive boat' and what have you, and I'm expecting the mystery to unfold as it goes along. I enjoy that the handler lightly scolds you for doing anything other than cleaning up; feeding and playing with the loddles (axiloti-like fish), or trying to rehome them, and also being lightly miffed with you ("As I said before...") whenever you try to break down a metal crate that you don't have the right upgrade for.

I've always quietly frowned upon games like Powerwash Simulator and Viscera Cleanup Detail, thinking that busywork has no place in a video game. Well, I've played Loddlenaut, a large part of which is scraping gunk off the sides of shipwrecks, for four hours now, and I'm very taken with it, so what do I know? It has no combat, doesn't require very much dexterity at all, and is just a game where you make incremental progress over time. It took me four hours, incidentally, to clock that recycling junk is how you get parts for upgrades. Now, though, I'm off to the races. It also took me some time to realise that there’s a map to make sure that you don't get lost and run out of oxygen (not suffocate; the screen just fades and you respawn with a small penalty of a loss of some items). It's so peaceful that I'd say it's an ideal podcast / second screen video game. The achievements are stress-free and you get them just by playing, which is nice.

The progression structure and focus on wildlife reminds me of Viva Pinata, except that it's under the sea and you, mercifully, don't watch the loddles mate. You have a home base, but I'm not sure to what extent you can customize it yet; it's mostly you heading out to clean up reefs. I'm liking it a lot; I always go in for what I tell myself will be a short burst (presumably out of residual Powerwash Simulator-driven doubt) and I look up and two hours (every session I have on this seems to be two hours) have passed.

I'm trying to spend less on video games and I plucked this out of my Steam library. I have so many video games that I don't even really know where they have come from. I do not recall buying Loddlenaut, and yet it's got the hallmarks of a Capitalist Overlord Raccoons video game. Though it's early days, I also get the sense that it has a positive message - 'clean up your shit, billionaires'. You don't get positive messages in video games, or art of any kind, very often, so it's nice to see.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved mini-review (2007, Bizarre Creations, PC, Xbox 360)

This is another backlog find; an arcade-action game that requires more dexterity, but I wouldn't say too much. It needs two analog sticks and a button (by default, a trigger) to activate the screen clear power-up. You're a shape in space and you fire lasers at other shapes for points and multipliers. It's as video-game as video games can be. Though I am terrible at it, I think this is more down to co-ordination issues rather than an actual dexterity issue. Physically, I can play it very well, but my brain struggles to co-ordinate the twin-stick-ness of it all. It's barebones as a game in that you have just one mode, but it's a great pick-up-and-play thing.

I've made light peace with the fact that I'm never going to get very far in these sorts of games. They're fun; really fun, and if you're reading this and you're thinking 'a twin-stick shooter sounds cool right now', fill your boots; I just find that the existence of games like this make me appreciate that games like Loddlenaut also exist.

Streets of Rage 4 mini-review (2020, DotEmu, released on literally everything including Google Stadia, oop)

For all its formidable difficulty, the latest Streets of Rage (side-scrolling brawler) is surprisingly accessible, with star moves and back attacks all available on the face buttons, and in combos initiated with the left stick. I'm having problems with spotting boss and level-hazard patterns and so occasionally get pummelled, but I've gotten A ranks fairly consistently and have even managed an S rank. There are difficulty settings, and initially I tried the easy equivalent, though I've settled now on normal and I'm still having a nice time.

This is a strong example of an effective revival of an ancient franchise. It's really fun; I love chasing combos in it, and I appreciate that you can unlock character skins from the old games. There's also an enemy named Margaret who's metal as fuck. There are lots of metal-as-fuck enemies in it. I love eating an entire cooked chicken off of the floor before throwing another gold-plated chicken at a fire-breathing Popeye while punk lesbians throw electricity and acid at me; that's gaming to me.

It's reminding me that I bought Streets of Rage 2 in the now-unavailable-on-Steam Sega Genesis Classics collection, and also reminding me that I've yet to finish it. SOR4 still has more life in it for me, though, and the achievements are spurring me on. That being said, one of the achievements is to beat a level without dying, so I don't think I'll be 100%ing this, even if the difficulty of the game itself is manageable.

The Spirit and the Mouse (2022, Alblune, NS, PC/macOS, PS)

 Margaret got me this for my birthday, and it's very charming. It's Super Mario Odyssey's 'collect stuff to progress' loop and magic realism wrapped in Ratatouille stylings; in that you're a rodent in a small French hamlet and the art and sound team are having the time of their lives letting you know about it. It's another one for 'there should be more games where you're a quadruped', which is also a Margaret phrase. Basically, if it weren't for Margaret, this whole project would read a lot differently. 

You're Lila, a girl mouse who thinks humans are cool and who gets electricity powers in a freak accident that results in a moody spirit guardian (ball of energy what helps humans) losing their own electricity powers, so you have to sub in after a storm and help a man get his television signal back so he can watch his soap and help a young woman get power back in her flat so she can finish her thesis, so that you can restore the moody spirit guardian's powers with their happiness; it's very Pixar. There are more quests, but I've done those two. You do all this by bargaining with lots of little other balls of energy so that they actually go and do their jobs of powering substations. They're all rambunctious little shits and I love them; the writing is fun. Funny? Yes? Not in a laugh out loud way. Wry and clever? Sure. The moody spirit guardian whose powers you absorb is such an arch little bastard, but I’m slowly earning his respect.

It has light 'you can't go here yet and you should just keep playing but we won't tell you because we're being annoying' elements. I spent ages trying to get around a fence to get a collectable; going up on a roof to drop down, going up a scaffold to drop down, doing this over and over and expecting different results; then I completed a quest and got a 'you can now phase shift through fences' power. I like the powers, and I don't even mind that they're drip-fed in. It just seems a bit not-cosy, in your cosy adventure platformer, to not have any 'hey, you can't do that yet' signposting. I'm not talking about adding a line of yellow paint through the quests (which isn't even a real thing that games do; stop banging on about it), but just a quick dialog box that goes 'hey, I can't do that yet', would be nice. Other than that, I'm having a great time in this game's world.

My accessibility notes are that the stylised visuals mean it'll run on low-end devices, including your handheld PCs, so I can enjoy it anywhere, on anything. I dare say it'd run on an Android gaming handheld; it's a very Nintendo 3DS game. THere's a lot of text with no voice acting, but the font size in the dialog box is quite big. I don't need to press many buttons at once, and I'm getting by very well with the analog stick and the face buttons without remapping. If the idea for this month is to revel in great games that are straightforward to play with one hand, Spirit and the Mouse, The is doing well.

Vampyr first impressions (2018, Dontnod Entertainment (NS, PC, PS, XB) 

I'm trying to broaden my horizons a bit, and this horror role-playing-game is helping. I'm not a horror person at all, and the Resident Evil remakes are sitting in my account for some reason, destined to be unplayed (though I may tackle them at some point this year, possibly with Margaret around to cover my eyes and ears). I have no idea how I came to own Vampyr; my only connection to it, as far as I can tell, being that the company behind it also made Life is Strange. You're a doctor who is also a vampire, so there's some moral """""""""choices matter""""""""" choices to be made in the same way as that game, but it's also a game with combat in it. I always appreciate a historical setting, and post-World War 1, Spanish Influenza-time, 1918, is a leftfield choice as far as video games go. I respect it.

It's not strict horror, which I think is why I'm finding it more absorbing than expected. It's... spooky? But there's enough in the setting and the storytelling and the investigative dialogue systems to have it stand out from route-one horror. I like that I can decide to be a vampire who doesn't hurt people, and that I can choose to not use the fact that I'm a doctor (a pioneer of blood transfusions, hyuck) as a cover to hurt people, but to actually set out to help them. I'm a real doctor, in spite of what happened to me. And this is all guff that I've invented in my head; you can also, like in the immersive sim Dishonored, decide to go all in on the supernatural powers and kill everyone, and have that also be a valid way to play through the game. I like how you can come up with your own rationality for your actions. I've only been killing people who directly attack me; either humans hunting me for sport, or actual vampires. I ate one rat and decided I didn't like it. I like being a straight-edge on this save. Maybe, after, I'll start a new save where I'm the bastard.

The only real issue I have with it is that the game has mandatory autosave, so if you make a decision that goes against your rationality (to see what'll happen, by accident, whatever), you have to live with it. In a way that's life (ahh, do you see), but it still makes me anxious that I'm going to make a """""""""wrong""""""""" or uncharacteristic decision. I already failed one dialogue interaction (I annoyed a guy and got locked out of a dialogue path, and you're supposed to use what you know about people to get to the bottom of what ails them so you can heal them and increase the quality of their blood so you can kill them, but really I just want to make them better), so I'm starting to feel like this could become a deeper problem.

Being a pacifist, levelling up slower than if you were to go full on bastard, mandatory boss fights become dull. Hit, dodge, hit, dodge, mess up the rhythm and get jumped, maybe die, repeat. There is a 'story' difficulty setting, and maybe I should be doing that to live out the fantasy of a vampire doctor who rejects the facts of his case, we'll see. I also don't care much for the crafting system that has you making cures for people and health potions for yourself (because of course) using ingredients you find in the world. I'm coming to Vampyr very late, and I accept that's where some of my weariness around this mechanic comes from; I'm too familiar with it and I quietly loathe it.

This is more of a first-impressions writeup than a review, but I am going to play more of it. More thoughts on the game could follow. They also might not. Life is full of these uncertainties.

It's not particularly difficult to play with one hand, either. On the 'normal' difficulty (described in game as 'the original Vampyr experience'), I'm dodging well enough and I haven't rebound the controls or anything. I'm not in any pain from playing it. I like that there's plenty of opportunities to put the controller down during a dialogue section. It passes the test for 'low dexterity'.

NBA Playgrounds (2017, Saber Interactive, NS, PC, PS, XB) review

There has been chat about this arcade basketball game being rubbish; I like it, though. If you only play it for two minutes, then, okay, you’ll be caught out by it presenting you with trading card packs; the sign, in any other video game, of predatory micro-transactions. It’s annoying to open them all (even if there is an ‘open all’ button, there’s a delay and an animation to sit through, but they don’t appear to be a vehicle for micro-transactions; it’s been three hours, and the game hasn’t asked me to spend any money at all. The packs are earned by playing; there’s a tournament mode and an exhibition mode. I like the tournament mode; it poses enough challenge, though each round in each tournament (there’s one per court; with court stages themed around countries) has an additional challenge (‘score two three-pointers’) associated with it, and they can get annoying. The tournament mode is generous with the packs, too; in three hours, I’d unlocked over half of all the (real, I think) players in the game, and was starting to get repeat cards, which increase stats in some opaque way that I don’t understand yet. The packs are tying in with the sports theme, I suppose; that and all the players having bobbleheads. I’m not sure why it’s taking leads from baseball culture, and I’m not enamored with it. It’s fine.

It plays well, as arcade basketball games go. I’m not sure what’s supposed to separate it from NBA Jam, which has always been okay, but only okay. I can’t get the hang of the stealing; it only works sometimes, but I think it’s me being new to the game as opposed to a mechanical failing. I’m having a good time with it, and I bet it’s a riot with other people. The online’s dead now (oh yeah, it’s been delisted from digital stores now, but give me a minute), but the game is 2v2, so you have up to four player-multiplayer if you want. It sounds alright.

There is a sequel to this game that I haven’t played, but I don’t plan to play it because it’s published by 2K (this one isn’t, so I don’t know what’s gone on there), and, unlike this one where the card packs are a stylistic choice, in the second one 2K charge for them on some level, because the Steam page lists ‘in-app purchases’ as a “““““““feature""""""" What has happened, I think, is that 2K have bought a property, delisted the version of it that treats players with respect and replaced it with the kind of predatory product that we’re all too familiar with. I suggest that you play the first one. They can never delist the game in your heart.

I’m faring well with the controls. The face buttons cover everything besides power-ups (yeah, it’s that kind of arcade sports game, but it’s fun to earn and activate them, really) and whatever an alley-oop is being on the bumpers and triggers, or a combination of the above; alley-oops are LT and A, for some reason, and I don’t know if I’m struggling with making alley-oops happen because it’s on a button combination or because, truly, I have no idea what an alley-oop is or does. But that’s fine; I’m only three hours in, and also Margaret and I are going to settle in Boston, which is more baseball country. But yes, it’s very playable with one hand.

You can still do a lot with one hand, actually

I’ve been getting mopey about my dexterity and hemiplegia, but I’m writing this section in a better mood than I wrote the first section in, and it’s important that I be thankful that I can play any of the games I write about on this website. I get by with a spider-like grip on a regular controller most of the time, but I got the Evil Controllers tip off an occupational therapist at SpecialEffect, a charity dedicated to helping people with disabilities play video games. They’re good people, so we’ll see where it goes. The way I’ve played video games for my entire life has served me very well, but there’s always room for improvement. I’m writing this in December (quite unusually for a writer, I do the opposite of procrastinating, although it’s not great for my resume that I couldn’t tell you right now if there’s just the one word for that), so maybe by the next issue I have some more for you on that.

For now, I’m enjoying bringing you tales from my backlog, so let’s keep going on that.

There are two kinds of people in this world; those who play video games and those who resort to tedious platitudes

I had an interaction over the holidays where I, impromptu, felt myself defending the concept of the video game. I was playing Lumines on the big television and someone I know who only plays video game versions of board games took an interest in it. I’m a big proponent of using casual puzzle games as a trojan horse to get the highly suspicious on board with the medium, so when I was asked what else I had that was maybe a bit easier (I am shit at Lumines, so I wasn’t its best wing-person), I tried my best, I really did.

I thought of Peggle, a casual puzzle classic, and they... didn’t engage with it. You can’t win them all. I should have gone for something like Balatro-clone Word Play, and by clone I mean that it’s Balatro’s round-based, power-up driven gameplay but with a Boggle grid. That’s not a criticism; I like it better than Balatro. I got a review copy of Balatro and can’t even bring myself to write about it because... well, they say if you can’t write anything nice, then you shouldn’t write anything at all; and I say that as someone who likes Poker mechanics. I should have been eating it up. At the same time, I know Balatro has its fans, and I think that’s neat! Maybe the person I was showing games to would have liked Balatro too!

This is someone who plays match-three games on their phone, and it occurred to me that PopCap walked so that companies owned by mega-corporations looking to predatory micro-transactions to make a few extra currency units could run. PopCap the company still exists as part of Electronic Arts, and I remain genuinely surprised that the only one of its titles to take the leap to predatory mobile sequel is Plants vs. Zombies. At some point, when the AYN Thor turns up, maybe, I’ll try out and review the versions of Plants vs. Zombies 2 that are out there that have the big-corp elements stripped out as developers set out to turn it into an actual game.

As it is, I wish there were more established PopCap IP on phones, so that I could say to befuddled relatives “do you know you can have this game without it badgering you for money?” I did mention Bejeweled in this fashion, but the person I was canvassing was adamant that they didn’t pay money for their phone games, so that went nowhere.

I talk a lot about the accessibility of video games in the context of disability, but there’s also the matter of games not being as accessible, or appealing, if you like, to the average person as they once were. I wasn’t big on the Nintendo Wii; you needed two hands for so much of it, BUT the fact remains that it was video games’ biggest moment since Pong. The holidays brought this into sharp perspective; another relative who was the first person I knew who owned a Wii admitted that they don’t play video games anymore. Part of this is that even Nintendo have given up on the concept of the intuitive control scheme; the motion controls in the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons are actively worse than those in the Wii Remotes, and motion has taken a back seat to controllers reverting to looking and functioning like airplane cockpits. I’ve heard that simile somewhere before, and I’m not taking credit for it; it remains laser-accurate, mind you. That’s why people play games on phones, but the games on phones aren’t from the same universe as the ones not on phones. I’m going to pull up the Google Play Store on my phone and reel off some game titles.

‘Jigsaw Family - Puzzle Game’, MISTPLAY: Play to Earn Money’; games with the genre and the word ‘game’ in the App Store listing don’t inspire confidence, and as for ‘play to earn money’, I’m going to fall back on ‘if you can’t write anything nice...’

‘Cluedo Chase’, ‘Monopoly GO!’; recognizable names! Yes! Unfortunately, I think if you went back in time and told Lizzie Magie that they’d go on to design an educational, instructional, anti-capitalist board game called ‘The Landlord’s Game’ that would inspire Monopoly, which would metastasize into a simpler version for black oblongs that has micro-transactions in it, then first they’d be befuddled - you’d have to explain to her what a smartphone and what an ‘in-app purchase’ is - and then they might not be best pleased. In-app purchases in Monopoly; I ask you.

There are versions of EA FC, Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox; all good ideas that have become video games’ household names, but that have had their artistic value eaten away at by greed. As my family’s resident tech support person, I always advocate that a child never plays Roblox (genuinely referred to by child safety campaigners as a ‘pedophile hellscape’) or Fortnite (Epic’s machine that exists solely to nickel and dime children, while willfully promoting IP backed by the worst people in the world), and that, if they must play Minecraft, then it should be the Java version; the version before Microsoft turned it into a nickel-and-diming children machine. It’s depressing that I have to use the indefinite article to talk about nickel-and-diming children machines, and that we’re even talking about them at all. It’s no wonder that people - you know people, don’t you, ugh, people - don’t play non-mobile video games, because the video games that have ascended to public consciousness have regressed back to being a medium predominantly the domain of the worst children you know, and being considered byzantine to inaccessible to any demographic beyond the eighteen to thirty-four year old male, while mobile games have very successfully weaponized accessibility, using vibrant color and appealing visuals to get the people who ‘don’t play video games’ into the freemium pipeline. 

I didn’t think to ask the relative who said that they don’t play video games whether they do, in fact, play a game on their phone. It’s interesting, I think, that there’s a divide, in the minds of the electorate, between ‘video game’ and ‘phone game’, when they’re one and the same; particularly as the nickel-and-diming has gotten so bad in ‘full-fat’ video games that the only difference  between them and games on mobile phones is the control scheme, and, arguably, the money spent on developing them. The Wii, then, was the very apex of video games, because it married intuitive control schemes with the Nintendo Seal of Quality. These were fucking Games. I’m talking to Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. about the interactions that I had over the holidays, and she raises a good point, which is that, if she hadn’t met me, a Video Game Enthusiast, she would have gone off video games, and now she’s this website’s ready and willing cosy game correspondent. I wonder if Margaret will come on and talk about her experience of the Nintendo Wii as the halcyon days of the video game. She’s already reviewed Super Mario Galaxy for this website, which she flagged to me as a game that she enjoyed at the time, and that I then bought her for the holidays, debasing myself like the dog that I am by spending £60 for fifteen-year-old games. It’s interesting, no, it is, that Nintendo is both responsible for bringing the medium into a golden age as well as bashing its head in repeatedly. 

Nintendo deciding to sleep-walk after its dull contemporaries is why we’re here. It’s grim that the first person in my life to buy a Wii says that they don’t play video games anymore. Maybe, since their developers have stopped respecting players’ time, money, and intelligence, they’re right. The developers of the games that are in the public consciousness now are far more craven now; for money; to be the makers of The One Game That You Play, that the series of decisions that made the Wii the most accessible gaming doohickey ever would not and could not be made now. The Wii, the thing that got your judgmental, ancient relatives up off the sofa, to cunt, pissed-up, a Wii Remote into the television during a high-octane Best-of-Five Tennis; an incomparable experience that will not and cannot be replicated.

Dr. Margaret Downs, PhD. reflecting on not being a games person and then becoming one

Some people grew up with video games, and on the other end of the spectrum there's me. I dimly remember playing pinball on my dad’s desktop, sitting in the black leather chair in the “computer room” that was a reality of life for so many millennials. The first console we had in the house was a Wii, circa 2008. It seems like many more people had a Wii than other consoles at the time. My best friend had one slightly before that, and she got me into Mario Kart.

She's the first friend I really remember playing video games with. I don't fully know why it wasn't something I did with friends before then. In hindsight, I think it's at least in part because video games were seen as being “for boys” in much the same way Legos were (funnily enough, something else I've gotten into as an adult woman.) Around that same time, I played Halo with my neighbor and I remember finding it intensely frustrating and thinking that maybe my window for getting into video games had closed.

Years went by, and I played Super Mario Galaxy when I was off school, but otherwise had very little to do with video games until I made a Steam account in college, because the guy I'd just started dating said I should. At the time (and for too long after) I was preoccupied with his opinion of me. I played occasionally, and we went to PAX East together, and I started to get a sense of the depth and breadth of video games out there. I got a Switch for Christmas 2019, mostly for party games, just in time for the world to shut down.

Then came Spiritfarer, in late 2020. I remember being surprised at how thoroughly that game sucked me in. I didn't think of myself as a “video game person” or a “gamer”. I'm still maybe not, but it opened my eyes further to the potential of the medium and what was important to me in a game. Pacing and intuitiveness of controls and how one progresses through the story are key to whether I'll stick with a game. A few Googles to help me solve a puzzle or remember where a particular resource comes from are okay, but I shouldn't need to look up *everything*. I sometimes enjoy open-world or exploration-heavy games, but I often lose interest once the novelty of the setting or the soundtrack wears off, so they’re not good for hundreds of hours for me. I’m much more taken in by tasks to complete and interesting characters. Even with more linear games, I find myself not wanting to commit to finishing a game, so it'll sit at 70% complete for ages, until I forget the story and have to either start over or accept that I won't finish it. (I just picked up Gris after some time away from it and took the latter route.) I want to be a completionist, but I've mostly accepted that it's okay if I'm not. 

I have some baggage around certain games too, due to the aforementioned guy, and I can easily see a world in which I packed up the part of me that plays video games along with so much else from that part of my life. But, just about a year ago, I met the proprietor of this establishment. I can (and do!) wax lyrical about “playing video games in love forever” which is just one of the many joys of our shared existence.

Another contributor to my late arrival to video games is that in a lot of situations, I can take or leave shooters, and that was the primary thing I thought they were until I was about 19. I thought for a while that my resistance to them was because I grew up in a very, very anti-gun household, and that may be part of it. Even as an adult, I sometimes feel like I'm going to get in trouble or be judged for playing a violent video game. Another part may be because I shoot left-handed and most games aren't set up for that, so the sights are out of whack and I'm even worse at it than I would be otherwise. There are ways around this, but, not to get too Marie Kondo about it, shooters don't spark joy for me. The main exception to this is Deep Rock Galactic, where my preferred class is ‘gunner’. I'm learning to do the things that do spark joy (see my Été review) and not get too bent out of shape about the rest. 

Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

I’m enjoying that the newsletter is not trying to be bought opinions of the latest big-budget games. It’s settling into a nice, cosy hobby, and though that in itself is enough, you’re invited to subscribe for free to the newsletter and read us talking about games we love and the hardware we’ve bought. I try to put together a newsletter that I would enjoy reading; It’s fun to talk about dexterity and motor accessibility issues as I try and fall back in love with games again, and Dr. Margaret Downs. PhD is excellent as our cosy correspondent, and I always love reading her pieces that always have a delightful personal touch to them.

As ever, if you’d like to get in touch for any reason, the email address is please@makebad.games