New client! New topic! I looked at every reason to get hyped for the customizable vehicular melee game Redline Royale over at Polygon.
Does this presage more of me writing about video games? Very likely not! I play so few. I don’t understand how anybody has time for it. But they’re fun when I do? I guess I really miss the days of just turning it on and playing a level, maybe saving a game. I think the last time I actually sat down with a console was a decade back to tackle The Last of Us. And gang, I am all for stronger storytelling in video games, but have you considered that maybe after 90 minutes of game, there should be more than ten minutes of play? Not a fan!
Overall the playable movie trend is not for me. My last real CPU attempt was a few years back when a coworker recommended Oxenfree to me. After three efforts (that is, fresh games) I quit without getting a quarter way through. Cripes, what a drag. It’s a point and click minus the ability to point and click. Is it well written? Yeah, but if you’re going to market yourself as a video game, I feel there should be some kind of actual game component. My idea of fun is not 22 hours of mousewheel scrolling to various frequencies and nothing else. You can’t even direct your character to the part of the map/screen you want to go. You have to legitimately hold down an arrow key for two straight minutes to cross the screen at the SLOWEST. Possible. Rate. Ugh. If you’re going to make me do that, at least feature something, anything within my passage. Oxenfree isn’t a video game, it’s a book that takes five minutes to turn each page. Deleting it from my computer made me so much happier for 90 seconds than than the game itself did over the course of 9 hours.
Even the Arkham games, all but inarguably the most perfect Batman stories ever told, don’t exactly have a lot of gameplay. There aren’t really combos. You just tell Batman you want to dodge or punch and he does all the work. God of War? Well it’s the story of an insufferably emo-pompous asshole sadist, but also you just kinda watch him work and press B as needed. What gives will all these non-game games?
Anyway, here’s Redline Royale, which has no story, endless stimulation, and no wait to start smashing other cars or jumping ramps. Maybe it’s great! I don’t know, I didn’t get to play it. But I know at the very least it won’t be a frustrating journey of 500 hours and no action on your part.