Games I played recently

Ace Combat 6

It turns out that you can stick many Xbox 360 games into an Xbox One and it'll download a version you can play in high definition on a console that may not melt down at any moment. I still have my original core XB360 - the one with RCA out instead of HDMI - so being able to play a game from 20 years ago on modern hardware is pretty nice. 

Ace Combat games somehow straddle the line between being military apologia and making you feel really fucking cool for flying fighter jets and I think it accomplishes this by having incredibly weird plots involving massive planes and secret weapons, having fake countries, and general melodrama involving people who are not you - the pilot. 

6 follows the widow of a fallen pilot as she tries to reunite with her daughter, there's also a subplot about a bank heist. Your wingman goes through some shit. It's not the greatest plot in the world but considering where a lot of other games try to be "meaningful" a lot of Ace Combat writing manages to be meaningful by totally commiting to the rediculous premies. 

All Ace Combat games have a problem where the main mechanics are flying, and you have a limited amount of encounters you can make because the playspace is essentially an unlimited sky where anything can go. Your enemies are also in planes, so you have to design enemy movement to be challenging to catch but not impossible. 

Eventually I did grok the user interface. The radar in the lower corner would warn me about missiles coming at me and I would dodge them at the last second. The targeting camera in the top left would inform me what direction my target was pointing, so I could turn in such a way to catch them and get a radar lock. The NPC wingmen you have are also not useless, and in some levels get the majority of kills, in that way it feels like you're part of a team. 

After finishing AC6 I was going to start Ace Combat 7 on the old PS4. I was incredibly hyped on discovering that Ace Combat 8 was in production but this meant that I got something out of The Game Awards which makes the 3 hours I wasted watching it somehow worse.

Arc Raiders

Arc Raiders is all about fucking over other players and I don't think there's much else to the game. There is a crafting economy. The post apocolyptic world seems very interesting and it would be fun to run around these levels hiding from robots and discovering secrets. 

This is an "extraction shooter" so that means any gear you gain from all your hard work and luck can be wiped away from one bad run. Lets say you have a really good gun that took hours to earn, do you really want to use it in a run and risk losing it?

I think trolling is a major part of the game, if you get downed by another player you are in a crawling around state and can hold the space bar to "surrender" or you can use proximity voice chat to beg for your life. I tend to hit Alt+F4 because the quit game button in the main menu is hidden. 

the world has fallen to robots and everyone is scavenging for goods on the surface, so why are we fighting? In every zombie game and movie the theme is obsessed with people being "the real monsters" and turning on each other in a harsh world. What would a nonviolent extraction shooter look like? 

Regretfully I cannot refund Arc Raiders

Beam NG Drive

Beam NG Drive added a big ass dump truck. Like the one you had as a kid, but the kind that actual people in quarries drive around. If you jump the dump truck it will collapse under it's own massive weight. What other game on the market lets you drive a dump truck? 

This kind of wish fulfillment is only possible in games and yet a lot of games miss this. Who among us would not want to drive a big ass dump truck?