Take a look at some of the biggest games and entertainment products to release from 1997 to 2003, look at their country of origin, and count on your fingers how many of them are British. By my estimate, there’s a handful of the most famous ones that come straight to mind. Majority video games, but also film and TV. Regular readers and subscribers know what my go-to is and we’ll get to the video games in a moment, but let’s talk about British TV a little. The Brits reading this can name some of their favorites (excuse me, favourites), but let’s look at the one that successfully crossed over to the American TV world:
The title of this post is meant to have two purposes: to highlight how media can become lost and the modern era’s means of recovering lost media. There isn’t always a perfect method to prevent lost media nor is there a perfect means to recover lost media without sacrifice to the media in question. I’ve faced this problem personally while gaming and emulating games, but I’ll get to that soon.
A brief overview of lost media is any piece of media whose preservation methods were either nonexistent or severely compromised to the point that part, most or the entire medium is effectively ruined or destroyed. Surviving copies can’t be located or recovered because they either don’t exist or sometimes won’t be released publicly, even after the copyright expires or the original author dies. For the longest time for obvious reasons, this has mostly applied to film, like so:
This film was released in 1927. It was kept in the MGM vault for decades until all surviving copies were destroyed in the 1965 vault fire. As of this writing, it only survives in posters like this and surviving still shots.
I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did
It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):
With more time and care, these could’ve helped the old games
This post was originally supposed to be about different archetypes in anime, though I’m delaying that to sometime in December as I don’t yet have enough research to discuss those in full detail. This week, however, I’ll bring up something that has crossed my mind before, but not with enough frequency to expand upon: forgotten plot points from the 3D Mortal Kombat universe.
The original idea came from a MojoPlays video that I couldn’t f[head rip]king find until a few minutes before writing this because I misremembered the title. Abandoned Story Threads instead of Forgotten Plot Points; potato, potahto. Either way, the video can be viewed on the MojoPlays channel through the link below.
Credit: MojoPlays
The gist of the video is that throughout the series, the Mortal Kombat games have introduced plot points that were about to heat up only for the devs to go in a different direction. With over 30 years out on the market, you’ve got your pick of the litter to choose from. For this week, it’s the 3D games from MK Deadly Alliance to Armageddon. Here’s the f[scream of pain]king short version: starting with Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi escaped from a fiery ass-whoopin’ at Scorpion’s hands, discovering the Dragon King’s “undefeatable” army in the process and bringing these mummified warriors to Shang Tsung where they formed a bond based on ignorance.
Context:
Channel: Kamidogu
After the Deadly Alliance is formed, they remove all obstacles that would block them from ruling all existence. Not happy sucking up to Shao Kahn for millennia, they kill him in his throne room then make their way to the Wu Shi Academy where Shang Tsung finally gets to consume the soul of the greatest warrior in Mortal Kombat History: The Great Kung Lao I mean, Liu Kang!
OGs can’t be beat!
So with Liu Kang and Shao Kahn dead, they operate a tournament under false pretenses in Outworld and use the defeated to return the mummified army to life with the goal of marching on Earthrealm with malicious intent. Raiden saw this from the heavens and organized the remaining warriors across the realms to stop them. Fun fact, you can find archived websites and forums debating the plot points of then-upcoming games, like this website MKSecrets.net, which for some reason still looks like it was made in 2001 even though it has details on MK1 (2023)… I thought that was most Japanese websites…?
Anyway, MK: Deception picks up from the premise of Deadly Alliance only the sorcerers were too powerful for all of the warriors (could’ve probably sent them all as a group, but MK9 proves that that wouldn’t have helped much) and so at his wits end, Raiden challenges them himself. Not even a thunder god could defeat the sorcerers and realizing that their goals were nearly complete, what was left was the amulet Quan Chi stole from Shinnok in MK4. He hangs onto it defeating Shang Tsung in the process, only to have Onaga reborn (hinted at from Reptile’s ending in the last game) and return to reclaim the army that the sorcerers so generously returned to life with the souls of conquered fighters.
All three men realize that danger was marching towards them and while they managed to temporarily hold them back, Raiden uses a last ditch attack on the Dragon King. It failed to even scratch him and he grabs a hold of the amulet which will be needed to form the six Kamidogu into a single entity.
Channel: MKIceAndFire
As for how Onaga acquired the Kamidogu, well it involved tricking a young boy named Shujinko and leading him across reality by the nose for 40 years. If this game were canon, that would’ve come back to bite Onaga in the ass, only for Shujinko’s efforts to go unrecognized as redemption and still get punished by a Dark Raiden. This will become important later.
Shaolin Monks was a bit of a beat ’em up remake of MKII (kinda) and I’d already talked about that before, so we’re skipping it considering it has nothing to do with the 3D trilogy anyway.
Armageddon was supposed to cap it all off and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it felt like a final send off before Midway got the crappy ideas out of the way in time to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.
Let’s not be too harsh though, it did help pave the way for the Injustice line.
Story-wise, the protector god of Edenia, Argus, is made aware that between the actions of the sorcerers and Shujinko being duped for that long, the warriors of the realms were learning more about the construction of the realms than the Elder Gods would be comfortable with and proposed to Argus to come up with a solution. He suggested total annihilation to protect the realms from their own residents, but his wife Delia suggested depowering them all since there were many heroes who fought tooth and nail to defend the realms from evil, not the least of which was Shao Kahn and Shinnok (whom we learn later was banished to the Netherrealm for eternity for treachery, leaving Quan Chi to do the heavy lifting through the Brotherhood of Shadow).
They’re granted the power to do this and choose to do so by making a competition of things for their sons Taven and Daegon. If things went to plan, the two men would engage in a friendly competition, grab their weapons and armor and race to defeat their mother’s firespawn (half-brother?) Blaze to achieve full godhood as both of them are demigods. In reality, the two brothers, under the watchful eye of a pair of dragons, Orin and Caro, are set on a different path. Caro, who was the guardian dragon of Daegon, lost contact with Blaze believing it to be an early sign to set him on his path. Instead, Daegon forms the Red Dragon clan in Caro’s name and signs off on unethical science experiments for the purpose of choking existence into coughing Blaze up. The way its presented makes me think of Unit 731 in Manchuria and its surgeon general Shiro Ishii. If you don’t know, look it up at your own peril.
This makes Daegon the antagonist of the Konquest mode and through no fault of his own Taven loses sight of the purpose of his quest. And his frustration and confusion at this whole course of events is best reflected at the several times he’s questioned and even considered abandoning ship. The quest stopped being fun for him as he lost the things he cherished. Blaze appeared at the end to catch him up to at least what the true purpose of the quest was and Taven is a hero if we compare him to the Ancient Greek model similar to Perseus or Theseus. Self-serving at times, but the guy still knows the difference between good and evil. Daegon’s descent into evil seems random until he learned that he was supposed to lose the quest and decided to take matters into his own hands, hence the birth of the Red Dragon.
Dropped and abandoned plot points are still a problem for the series as it’s developed a reputation for introducing points and leaving them to collect dust. We barely get five minutes with the concept before the devs (read: Ed Boon and John Tobias) moved onto something else. You could say the fandom is also to blame for this as dedicated fans have asked (demanded) the team to release canonically deceased characters as DLC, but staying with the 3D games where the problem expanded, there’s more to say about it during this era than anywhere else in the series.
Starting with Deadly Alliance, Shao Kahn was established to be killed in the intro to this game, with Deception and Shujinko’s story acting as a prequel taking place some years before the events of Deadly Alliance where it all converges. Shujinko himself was invited twice by the White Lotus Society and later by Shang Tsung himself to represent Earthrealm in the tournament but couldn’t attend for different reasons. The White Lotus got tired of waiting for him to power up (never mind that the tournament is hosted every 50 years) and due to his cleansing journey with Nightwolf, he had to go back to the Netherrealm to gather more hatred, from none other than the ghost of Hanzo Hasashi.
This part doesn’t necessarily screw around with the timeline as egregiously as following plot points, but Armageddon is where it all breaks down. Canonically dead characters are resurrected off-screen and based on what we know we can connect the dots, but often the devs are a bit cagey when it comes to showing how, who and/or why characters are returned to life. The 2011 continuity shows that Quan Chi has brought Noob and Sindel back to life and claimed the souls of those killed by Sindel herself in the eleventh hour, but it’s not shown whether he brought Shao Kahn back to life or if he did why he’d do so, or even why the rest of the villains would agree to this arrangement.
Channel: BruskPoet
I’m not saying this moment in the story is bad, I like it a lot. But the nonexistent explanation for how all this can come to be is what sours me on it somewhat. I’d say there’s no care for a consistent timeline especially in a fighting game (something that doesn’t escape Tekken), but I think it’s more along the lines of the devs wanting their personal favorites to shine brighter than the others, which is why the franchise works better as video games and toy lines than it does movies.
Most of the time…
For what it’s worth, the characters have been mostly consistent with a few touch ups here and there, but if you ask people like The4thSnake, there’s a lot under the hood that could use some light to heavy rewiring from individual characters to whole ass f[swords clashing]king plot points, like what I’ve been writing about here. I’m a bit torn personally, because it brings a charm not found in other series, but this many plot holes treats the timeline like a redheaded step child. Doesn’t stop people from trying, as I’ve stated before, I rewrote MK: Shaolin Monks myself like it was Dragon Ball as that was what I was watching at the time.
Why bother with the 3D games, though? Well, of all the plot points introduced and left by the wayside, the 3D games did it the most and the worst of any other era, which seems to be the result of developmental inconsistencies prior to release on store shelves. It certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying though and it likely will keep going for as long as there is a Mortal Kombat to fix. Nothing too serious at this point, but it’s both fun to expand on what was and offer critique for one of the series most tumultuous times in its history.
Normally, my blog posts tend to shed light on the obscure, the niche, the hardly known or talked about entertainment products that probably have only two “articles” dedicated to them, and by articles I mean something along the lines of a vague Wikipedia article or a social media post. This time, I want to talk about something that grabs headlines every holiday season and has done so reliably since around 2007.
What brought about a post like this? Well, in another episode of Piracy is the Best Policy, I emulated the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops for old times’ sake. I played it and its sequels yonks ago on console and I kept going back to gameplay of the mission where US Navy and Marines patrol the Mekong in the dead of night to the Rolling Stones so I thought I’d hype myself up. During gameplay, I realized a lot of things that caught my eye having briefly been a part of US Army basic training. Wrong uniforms, anachronistic weaponry, and confusion of the military branches were some of the worst headscratchers, but looking at the plot it reminded me of this article and subsequent video by WatchMojo.com about confusing video game plotlines.
Disclaimer: the video and article are both from mid 2015 and Black Ops was saved for an Honorable Mention, but all things considered, I think it still holds up even if the game specifically isn’t mentioned. So for a recap, the plot of Black Ops is that Marine officer and CIA Operative Alex Mason is being interrogated by unknown entities in the late 1960s about his extensive service record in the clandestine government office.
His prime objective in Black Ops is to thwart an incoming Soviet threat, but due to Soviet mind games involving a mysterious sequence of numbers, he gets turned around each time. Faulty intelligence in Vietnam, a failed assassination in Cuba (one of hundreds), brainwashing programs in a Russian prison, and a series of mounting catastrophes approaching the US motivate the CIA’s actions throughout the 1960s.
From that description alone, you’d get the impression that the espionage angle is front and center, but one thing the CoD franchise didn’t realize until the 2020 reboot was that there’s more to espionage than donning a uniform. Studying the target areas, polyglotism, and mirroring the customs and cultures of an area all go to that, but what Black Ops lacked was any use of gadgets. Concealed cameras, hidden compartments, hidden weapons, and other such gizmos were all a part of an operative’s arsenal and unless they were going to a warzone, operatives were casually dressed. You only ever get that in the first mission of the game. The rest of the time, it’s an Olympic swimming pool of action and adrenaline.
Not the first time something like this would be used as a slight against CoD. Modern Warfare 2 walked through a controversy concerning the “No Russian” mission.
A jumping the shark moment in the series, some argued that violence was hitting too close to home — keep in mind, that the annoyances of post-9/11 aviation and air safety were fresh. 9/11 internet memes would be years away. Others claimed that CoD could’ve and should’ve done better to shock the public if they were going for a gut punch. Speaking of which, the terrorist attack on London in Modern Warfare 3 was also seen by some as one of several ridiculous moments in that game.
To my knowledge, the plot of Black Ops II didn’t have many controversies from the media or the audience, but there was one from Zero Punctuation, notably about most of the good guys being white Americans in contrast to the predominantly Latino villains. Personally, this criticism holds some water, but not a lot. Admittedly, there’d be more mileage in the decision to interrogate a terrorist on an aircraft carrier while said terrorist hacks into the ship’s computer and turns its weapons on civilian targets. It’s also worth noting that this terrorist was personally connected to the protagonist Navy SEAL David Mason, Alex Mason’s son. My knowledge is limited on this, but since he surrendered to the Navy here, shouldn’t the NCIS have performed an investigation on him or something? I know in the campaign he asks for David personally, but why would the Navy honor that request? Seems like a lapse in judgment, developer ignorance, or both.
Well, all was well and good for CoD until the release of 2013’s Ghosts after which everyone who held a grudge against the franchise lobbied their complaints to any passerby who’d listen. The games after that would focus on a futuristic element until massive backlash to 2016’s Infinite Warfare, coupled with a “gun to head” marketing tactic of tacking a MW remaster to the reviled game caused Activision-Blizzard to focus on 2017’s World War II roots in a callback to the franchise’s beginnings in the early 2000s.
Was this a good move? Well, Black Ops 4 the following year would make it seem like a one off until Modern Warfare was fully rebooted in 2019 while Black Ops Cold War put more emphasis on the espionage in juxtaposition with the standard military campaign. Matter of fact, the lack of juxtaposition was a valid criticism Zero Punctuation had against Black Ops in 2010. You know a game is nuts when an earlier game has more stealth missions than the game built around clandestine operations.
As I was playing my pirated version of Black Ops, I kept finding all the stuff that would turn off anyone who’s served in the military or even military historians, the uniforms and anachronistic weapons being one of them. Also the overloaded action as noted by Yahtzee Croshaw led me to an old video on the CoD franchise and one pivotal moment in the franchise’s history came from the development side.
In the middle of the development of Modern Warfare 2009, Infinity Ward founders Jason West and Vincent Zampella were booted for conflicts of interest and insubordination. These vague accusations have never been elaborated on as of this writing, but according to the video, Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick reneged on a promise to divvy up the revenue generated by Modern Warfare 2, leading to a mass resignation soon after.
In the end, West and Zampella settled the matter out of court in 2012 for an undisclosed amount of money. Whether this had a direct influence on the series for the next decade until Modern Warfare 2019, I can’t say with confidence, but indirectly it opened the door to industry-wide wage theft and abuse in this medium. Coincidentally, the controversy surrounding the working conditions at Team Bondi, the Australian developer of L.A. Noire, were made public by former employees, including those who never saw the game through to its end, and what is known of the fallout between Infinity Ward and Activision was enhanced by the studio-wide mismanagement of Team Bondi, and their subsequent bankruptcy. All the punishing work to make one game, nothing to show for it, and worst of all it didn’t live up to its hype, forever designating it to cult classic status.
Team Bondi and L.A. Noire is an extreme example, but it’s nowhere near unheard of. Any old Google search will reveal a plethora of games that were victims of meddling from publishers, tyrannical studio heads, unreasonable hours, or anything else known to hinder development, even to the point of cancellation. Former Escapist Magazine journalist Jim Sterling has multiple videos detailing the industry-wide abuses, and they’ve made Bobby Kotick a feature on their show, The Jimquisition.
Being relatively late to the CoD scene, I wouldn’t have known about this otherwise but most fans didn’t pay much attention to the legal troubles or several canceled video games due in part or in whole because of the Infinity Ward fallout, but it’s worth noting the narrative differences between them and the devs of Modern Warfare 3, Sledgehammer Games. Across the trilogy, the spectacle of the games crosses over into cartoonish levels of action to the point where it might as well be a parody, like In the Army Now pretending to be Saving Private Ryan but wound up like The Hurt Locker. If you don’t know, the veteran and military communities hate The Hurt Locker for many reasons.
For what it’s worth, CoD is at least trying to refine its story campaign even if the hardcore demographic is stuck in multiplayer scoring killstreaks with death machine or UAVs, but personally I think the Modern Warfare and Black Ops reboots are doing a good job with the juxtaposition. It remains to be seen if Modern Warfare III can continue that trend. If so, great. If not, then the best we’ve got is the upcoming Six Days in Fallujah which as of writing is in early access. And one day I’ll play all of these, ideally after buying them and installing them on a disk drive larger than two terabytes.
This week’s recommended channel is TrueUnderDawgGaming.
This channel is dedicated to news, lore, updates, and everything else concerning fighting games, most notably the Mortal Kombat franchise. With Mortal Kombat 1 releasing in the next month, TrueUnderDawgGaming and other such YouTubers have been keeping tabs on the upcoming characters for the game, making individual videos on the characters and their updated appearances as Ed Boon and NetherRealm Studios put the finishing touches on the game.
The channel’s runner is very familiar with the 3D Mortal Kombat era as well, with videos on select characters or even events from those games and showcasing move sets of characters from this era as well. Die hard MK fan? Fighting game enthusiast? Looking for fighting games to try out and learn about? Look no further than TrueUnderDawgGaming.
By the way, I have a surprise coming up. Between the time of this posting and next week’s topics, I’m going to post an update on a manga returning after August 21. Those of you who’ve been keeping up with the series may know what I’m talking about, but for those looking for a sneak peek, look to the post from July 28.
Here at Opinions on Entertainment, I’ve made clear where I stand on several forms of media, most notably video games. One of my earliest blogs talked about my experiences with PCSX2, the PS2 emulator. The games listed then compared to what I’ve played recently is significantly different, but to recap, I had some of the 3D Mortal Kombat games, both God of War games for that system, a pair of racing games, and several Naruto games. As of writing this, I’ve been both GoW games twice on normal and hard, beat Midnight Club and progressed as far as I could with NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, unlocked every ending in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones I believe I’m a few parkour sessions away from obliterating the Vizier.
For that last part, my exposure to the Prince of Persia series is limited to the PSP ports and the DS game as well as the ham-fisted attempt at a movie adaptation so I can’t definitely speak on what I think on the series as a whole without a well-rounded picture. But between Farah from The Two Thrones, Casca from Berserk, and most recently My Adventures with Superman’s take on Lois Lane, the tan tomboy waifu trough is never empty.
I doubt she fits the bill to a T, but from what I’ve seen in The Two Thrones, I’m beyond impressed.
The aforementioned games above cover only a swath of games I had on the real life PS2 and only the ones I remember sinking as many memory points towards. There are the GTA games that kid me never finished in any capacity, the Mortal Kombat games that I finished many times over spanning several years, all three of the Max Payne games on the consoles that I actually finished backwards compatibility on the Xbox 360, three of the Uncharted games, and so on. Since I started my gaming journey from the young age of four years, I’ve had several consoles and handhelds. The PS1 crawled so my PS2 could eventually sprint for a solid decade on my family’s old TV; the PS3 and Xbox 360 were last minute additions before their successors were made available the same year I picked them up, 2013; the Wii, though a gimmick honestly speaking, was a successful gimmick nonetheless; and due in part to outside expenses and the pandemic, if I wanted either an Xbox Series X or PS5, getting one for a good price was the best joke ever told since Peter Parker asked for advance pay.
And don’t even hedge your bets on Black Friday like I did when I got the Xbox One in 2014. That was a collaborative effort and now that I’m an adult, I’m on my own.
All that cataloguing of video game console history from about 2002 to the present, what about my history with PC games? Before we dive headfirst into that, I want to clarify what that could mean. Compared to console games, from my POV, PC games and their development is several levels more creative than what could be put on a console. Those of us who are old enough to remember, browser games tended to be powered by the magic of Adobe Flash and hosted on such sites like MiniClip, Y8 and Newgrounds. The schlock we convinced ourselves of being video games at the time aren’t all that hot anymore but trust me when I say that those were the groundbreakers that gave us the PC games of today. The same goes for games that came with Windows OSs like 3D Pinball and Minesweeper or even their Google recreations. Speaking of which, they’ve also broken some ground in that field with select Google Doodles.
All that said, including all of these as PC games meets technical definitions, but to me seems a bit like overkill, especially when a bunch of these are either point-and-click or keyboard function with only a few of them allowing for a switch or incorporating both in the settings. They’re also less likely to be counted as PC games by other entertainment-based outlets. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen Sift Heads or Warfare 1917 get announced during my time as a subscriber to Game Informer magazine. So to keep things conservative, browser and operating system-included games will have to get the boot. Sorry, Snake.
It’s probably no secret that computers of most varieties are used in video game development and have been since the first ones were in the conceptual stage as early as 1958.
From there things rose, then fell thanks to E.T.’s boning by Atari, then rose again when Nintendo Man crossed to the U.S. to save us in the 1980s. After all, you need to develop with something and sock puppets don’t really get a lot done. By the early 90s, while Sega and Nintendo were engaged in the most intense session of Punch-Out since Mike Tyson fought Evander Holyfield, PC games have mostly been doing their own thing with 1992’s Wolfenstein and the following year’s Doom. id Software’s fleet of computer games, spearheaded by a pair of Johns named Carmack and Romero, paved the way for first-person shooters as they churned them all out across the 90s and early 2000s. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not have noticed that this new genre of games was once known as a Doom clone until you played the game that demanded you to take revenge on demons on Mars.
By the 2000s, it was MOBAs like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls and simulators like The Sims and its admittedly chibi counterpart My Sims.
So, when did I first get into PC gaming as I’ve defined it? I can’t really remember with precision, but I know it started with the aforementioned browser and Windows games from when I was in middle school and even a bit earlier at home. Since my mom was a huge fan of the puzzle and tile sliding games, she managed to install games like Zuma’s Revenge or similar on our home PC when I was around seven years old. So, by the definition I’ve listed, I started out with PC games not too long after I got my PS2. Though I’ve dedicated a section of my childhood to the latter.
For the longest time, PC gaming was lost in the backseat while my attachment to console gaming carried me well into high school, even if the machinery I was using was starting to show its age. I have no idea if dusting off the PS2 despite it being in active use would’ve made any difference, but the TV it was hooked up to was from the 1980s and ran for nearly 30 years before we replaced it with a flatscreen.
In the PC gaming realm, I’ve had to replace my computers. The first PC I got was a 2004 Sony Vaio that I got as an elementary school graduation gift that lasted me three years. I hardly played games on that as that’s not what it was primarily designed to do. In gaming terms, it was a lemon that would probably struggle to run Doom, and according to WatchMojo.com, anything can run Doom.
After that was an Acer Aspire from 2012 that I also struggled to run at times for various hardware reasons. I mostly played YouTube or watched movies on pirate sites, but the one game that kept me was The Sims 4 which I’ve been playing ever since, even on the computer I’m typing this on — and falling into the same trap of leaving saves unfinished in favor of new ones. What can I say? Like Lego, it’s fun to build and destroy and play, but maintenance sort of sucks the fun out of that unless it’s part of play, like a little Lego maintenance worker.
By the time, I was in college, the Acer was also on it’s last legs with the hinges on the screen giving out, though I managed to nab Civilization VI before switching to something more stable to keep up with my studies in college in 2017. Along with the new computer, I put more of my eggs into Civ, The Sims, and Origin, which previously launched The Sims let me play a trial version of Battlefield 1. Side note: I preordered it a few weeks before release in 2016 shortly after getting Mafia III for the Xbox One, and all-in-all while Mafia had a stronger story and killer soundtrack, BF1 had better gameplay variety and didn’t crash like a fleet of Hindenburgs. Weird that soldiers from the 1910s had more semi- and full-automatic SMGs for primary weapons as opposed to the bolt-action, breechloading, and self-loading rifles that they actually did.
There was also the Doom collection of video games I got at a discount. I don’t remember what specific model my previous laptop was, just that it was time for me to get a new one because the old one had the same problems as the one it replaced, but worse. Here, I’ll indict myself as fairly messy. If I’m not accidentally spilling a sugary drink on the keyboard, I’m just letting the keyboard and screen get dusty. I know, I should take better care of my equipment.
In a nutshell, the hinge failed, the battery degraded, the games were prone to slow down, and just like Mafia III on launch day, it also crashed like a fleet of Hindenburgs. Then came the computer I use today, the Acer Nitro 5 in May of 2021. Of course, the library carried over, except for the saves, and it felt like a true upgrade. The last computer could boast all it wanted about its touchscreen capabilities, but when you keep your promise to let me play as Vietnam in 1080p and lead me to a win, then you’ve really got no competition. Maybe this is how you become a member of the PC Gaming Master Race.
In my short time dedicating most of my points toward the PC gaming market as of late, I’ve found something that was probably well-known to PC gamers for decades now; it’s more convenient at times to be a PC gamer than a console gamer.
But in general, PC games are mod friendly as my Sims 4 mods folder can attest; if you need more storage, a disk drive can help you out most of the time; without a real competition, PC gaming is the sole dominator of online games; and when it comes to customization, the sky’s the limit. You could keep your machine as simple as can be, or give it all the bells and whistles that your little heart desires. And there’s really no stopping you from having a relic of a video game. Before their delisting on Steam, gamers could get the original GTA 3D games and compared to their console versions, they never took up as much space, perhaps as a reminder of the days when online capabilities were trickier to develop for so 20-year-old games were comparatively smaller. I’m 98% certain that if I wanted to, I could fill my steam library with the top sellers from the 90s until the early-to-mid 2000s and have space left over for GTA 5, one of the modern Call of Duty games, or a gacha game like Genshin Impact or one of the Honkai games. And then I’d need to consider whether to get myself more storage.
Having since transitioned from console to PC gaming a majority of the time since around 2017, it’d be easy to say I wouldn’t go back, but I don’t see that happening. My Xbox One sits on top of the entertainment center while working on an impressive dust collection, but it still functions decently well. Some of the games I have on that have PC versions or can be emulated, though with a lot of them prone to padding or having high difficulties by design, the time spent grinding my way through long or hard games is still saved on the Xbox and I’ve had more fun starting new games in PCSX2 than knowing my data from the last save on console got corrupted and I had to start from scratch. I suck enough at Sekiro and I’d like to pick up where I left off than start from square one.
Still, my death grip on game progression has loosened so much as I’ve been able to breeze through games like a shinobi on an assassination mission, so single-player progress has lost all its importance on me especially since I can look for a gameplay video or a summary on the associated wiki if I care so much about that. Moreover, some games are cross platform so if I screwed up because of a flaw on mobile, I can rectify that on PC or console. Multiplayer though proves a different matter altogether, so while I’m not gonna fuss too much about starting GTA 5 from scratch, the grinding mechanics of GTA Online are reciprocally so. Levels 1-12 go by relatively fast, but once my friends and I on console got into the hundreds, it stopped mattering. Level 120 was what we were gunning for anyway because it unlocked the Minigun.
I’d be willing to go to a hybrid style of gaming in the right conditions, but until then, I’ll keep things on PC. Fingers crossed the stuff I listed here that works for PC translates to consoles in the future.
This week’s YouTube recommendation is GTASeriesVideos.
A fan channel dedicated to RockStar games, news, and announcements, this channel occupies the same role as Clownfish TV, along with gameplay videos of anything developed or published by RockStar as a whole, to include guides, lore explanations, exposition, and for a time theories on the GTA series for example, as well as a look into cut content. For fans of the series who have had burning questions about XYZ, it’s worth checking this channel out to hear what conclusions they’ve drawn from all their hard work researching. Or if you want to look at guides and get a 100% completion, you’re welcome to view that too.
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