The Patreon Letter - 15th June, 2019

Hi everyone, Em here today! I am writing this with a podcast start time looming over me, so I'm going to have to get right to it this morning! 

Gamer Christmas is over and we're left with the strange hangover of getting way too invested in some commercials, much like every year. I enjoy watching E3 in a sort of detached way, because I don't really play modern games very much, so outside of Nintendo there's rarely anything announced that's going to do much for me. Honestly, Nintendo often doesn't do that much for me anymore, but the nostalgia is real. I definitely marked out for Banjo, even though I haven't played Smash in months and probably will never get this DLC. It's just how it is to be into a thing for your whole life, sometimes.

I don't need to tell everyone reading this that capitalism is both bad and extremely potent. We all live this hell every day, with a copy of Marx in one hand and a desire to definitely pick up a new thing for ourselves because we got paid yesterday and the Marx (and the world, let's be honest) made us sad and really, this new Mana collection on Switch would help very much, and it's only $39.99. This particular rut of bad ideas is how I ended up with Skyrim on Switch and only ever played 90 minutes before deleting it in disgust because I have a PC. I even have Skyrim installed with a bunch of mods!

I've also not played that for more than 90 minutes.

Buying things is not a crime, of course, and this letter isn't really about that. I'm sure I'll pick up the Mana collection at some point because it's a huge gap of mine. But coming off of the big commercial show I definitely felt the pull to acquire something new (new to me, those games of course are old) when I have a bunch of perfectly good games I'm working on, like Phantasy Star (which is fantastic on Switch, if you've never played it) or Outer Wilds, which I'm picking away at. 

That's not a JRPG however, and sometimes you feel the call to get really into one of your pet genres, and for me it's platformers and JRPGs. Which is how, when I decided I didn't have $40 for a new game, I found myself looking really hard at the Switch eShop at a copy of I am Setsuna because it was only $15. I didn't buy that, that would be ridiculous, I definitely don't have time for bad modern JRPGs when I have so many gaps. But I sure did think about it for 15 minutes before I looked up gameplay on youtube and reminded myself there are limits to impulse desires. 

The thing that really gets me, however, is that I have a ton of games just sitting on a shelf waiting for me to play them. I know we all do, but as someone who has made it their job to emphasize how much old things matter and how you should dig around in the backlog, I get very frustrated with how hard it is for me to follow my own advice. I recently culled a lot of games out of my collection, especially stuff I had already played but kept around for inertial reasons, and what's left is a good stack of things that I should just pull from when I have these feelings. 

And yet, there I was, once again trying to figure out which Atelier game was the actual best one because you cannot tell from the outside. And is this one a sequel? Oh this is an anniversary project, so maybe I should play these 4 other games to understand what it's doing. This is the internal hell brain of the old games gamer. 

One might surmise that I don't actually want to even play games, it's just I'm so locked into thinking about them like this that it's impossible to escape. And you'd have a valid point, I definitely moan regularly about how burnt out I am on games and how much I wish I could do anything else, but usually I'm doing that while I'm not playing games and doing something else and just tired thinking about the culture of games we circle the periphery of here at abnormal mapping dot com. The truth is, when I sit down to just enjoy a game off deadline on my own terms, I tend to have a better time of it. And if I don't, I can actually let go of it and say I tried it, but no thanks.

Considering that huge stack of games, and my knowledge that this is true for me, what I'm going to do after publishing this letter (and recording a podcast, look for our upcoming Nichijou episode of Your Uncle's Beach House!) is: go plug up my Wii U, go put fresh batteries in my Wiimote, and go dig out that copy of Xenoblade Chronicles that I bought for $80 like five years ago but then never played. Maybe I won't like it, maybe I'll just get annoyed and let it go, but I won't know until I try and honestly, it's not like sitting around looking at storefronts is actually going to make this sense of ennui get any better.

I'll report back when there's something to report, tell you how Shulk is. 

Until next time,

Em