Reevaluate Your Opinions

 

I can't help but feel that in recent years that the general gaming public has a bit of a problem when it comes to the way they treat games.  The way it seems to me is that a game comes along that ends up being the main character for a while, think titles like Red Dead, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, New God of War etc, then these games are played once by most people and then shelved while the user goes on whatever social media platform and joins the collective marketing driven gush is going on at the time.  After a period of time the collective gush dies down and everyone moves to the next thing, the game is largely forgotten in public discussion and the game is never played again by a majority of the people who bought copies of it. 

Writing about how this is a shitty way to be in this blog, now that I think about it, is probably a case of preaching to the choir because I know for a fact that the vast majority of people who engage with my little corner of the internet aren't like that but I think it's worth stating that it is a shitty way to be.  It's a shitty way to be at the peak of the games popularity because most games have higher difficulties and extras that are skipped by a majority of the userbase and its a shitty way to be after the fact because I'm of the opinion that reevaluating your old tastes to help better understand and appriciate the stuff you consume currently is good practice so allow me to regail you with 2 times that this happened to me.

The first case was only a few days ago from the publish date of this post with Doom 2016.  It took me a long time to get around to it since I went through a portion of my life using only trash laptops and I wasn't about to play a game like Doom on a console.  When I did play it I had a fun time with it but I remember feeling that the game was overly long and felt like an absolute slog to play by the end.  I enjoyed my time with it but the additional modes for score and time seemed like absolute overkill for a game that could barely handle its own length in the campaign.  This time around, however, I had a lot more fun with it.  I don't know if its because I'm just better at games or because of my even better hardware or because I was streaming it but the experience was significantly more enjoyable the second time around.  Upon finishing it I even had a go of the arcade mode to see what was up and found it to be a cool addition to the games content package.  If I'm being really honest with myself I think my opinion of  the game "barely being able to handle its own length" stems from the fact that the system I played it on originally was constantly crashing and blue-screening during the playthrough.  I was replaying sections a lot because of these hardware issues that were not fault of the game and yet it sullied my opinion of it.  I'm glad I went back to it because now its a title that has become a candidate for a possible future speedrun. 

The second and much more violent example of an opinion change is with The Evil Within.  I picked it up and played it around the time that it launched and holy fuckin hell did I absolutely HATE it at first.  I thought the horror elements were lame and trying overly hard to "scare" the player with just huge piles of gore.  But more than that I hated the game itself.  The first few chapters set me up to believe I was going to be playing a stealth game only for the majority of encounters to be some kind of ambush situation.  The constant lack of ammo and healing had me frustrated rather than on edge and when the game threw a boss at me I was either bored or frustrated.  The upgrade system was cumbersome and stupid and I felt that at base, every enemy was far too tanky and combat was not fun to engage in at all. But then I watched a friend of mine play it on Twitch and suddenly I felt the need to give it another try and my opinion did a complete 180.  Maybe its because I knew what challenges were ahead on the second try, maybe its because I was in a completely different head-space than the previous playthrough but either way I had a MUCH better time with it.  I still think the horror is kind of lame but maybe its because horror today is so oversaturated with untalented developers making complete shite that The Evil Within seems like a breath of fresh air.  But I also just enjoyed the game a lot more.  I understood from the outset this time that ammo is scarce and I played much smarter that I had a better time with it although the upgrade system is still stupid and using gel to upgrade pockets and sprint time is extremely annoying.  But overall I like The Evil Within now, its a cool game and I want to try and beat it on Akumu one day.

So go back and replay some of those things from your past.  Same goes for books and movies too, always worth seeing if stuff holds up for today you the same way it did for old you.  Maybe you'll discover something cool that rubbed you up the wrong way before or maybe you'll realize that younger you was an idiot that like trash.  Either way its a fun thing to do so go try it