As gamers inevitably do, I’ve entered one of those weird gaming phases where strange, unidentifiable gaming urges bubble up and I search through my game library hoping to find whatever game can scratch that itch. You probably know what I’m talking about. Games you should be hyped for sit lonely and unplayed because, for whatever reason, you don’t feel like saving the universe. Games you should be intrigued by remain unzipped in c:games because, for whatever reason, you’re not as charmed by this chunky indie platformer as you thought you were.
The last game I beat in full was Bob Came in Pieces, a dull indie physics-based puzzle game that failed to capitalize on its premise – but I couldn’t stop playing it. Instead of playing Just Cause 2 or Mass Effect 2 – both of which are sitting under my TV with a handful of hours played between them – I moved onto Star Wars: Dark Forces, a 15 year old FPS I haven’t played in as many years. Why? I don’t know. I bought it as part of the Jedi Knight pack on Steam last Christmas, and for some reason had the urge to double click it. And now that I’m finishing that up, I’m going to drop $6 on Outcast, even though I know almost nothing about it.
But doesn’t it look weird?
In the wake of slick AAA titles and high-concept indies that everybody’s blogging about (guilty as charged), there’s something refreshing about playing games unburdened by blogospheric pressure (the force per unit area exerted against a game by the weight of critical blog posts). Even though Dark Forces was in fact one of 1995’s slick AAA titles, 15 years later, it’s just an old-school FPS that costs as much as a meal at McDonald’s. I can be more generous towards its faults, and its strengths stand out even more by virtue of its age. Bob Came in Pieces doesn’t have the advantage of old age, but can I really be that critical towards a small-release indie game that’s actually kind of enjoyable?
For the next few weeks, I want to invite you all along on one of my weird phases, and I promise it won’t be as uncomfortable as that sounds. I want to highlight some of these games that maybe you haven’t thought about in a decade, or ever. Now that we’ve moved past some of the big releases from the last few months, I think we can spend some time looking at games without casting judgment on them, without worrying about whether they represent the future of anything, or whether they’re even art or not. We can just talk about games as games.
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