My Four Dadgames: The Definitive Review
Starfield = Takes A Nation Of Millions
I really can’t remember who said it, but there is a crushing truth to the joke that men over 40 stop looking for new music and instead have four1 albums that they listen to endlessly for the rest of their lives. Now while for me that’s not strictly true for music,2 it’s my gaming habits that are instead resolving into a terrifyingly close counterpart. For what seems like months now, I’ve had both Infinite Wealth and Returnal staring down at me as I approach my PlayStation 5 controller to turn the machine on, only to hear that Gran Turismo 7 disc3 whir up and boom - I’m obsessively flicking through the used car dealership and weekly races to see what’s available. It’s all too easy. Gran Turismo 7 is just so nice, so fun, so comforting, I’m content playing it with very little effort. In contrast to re-learning the muscles for Returnal’s twitchy dynamics or girding myself for the inevitably long intro to Infinite Wealth, I can get a good couple of hours of driving under my belt, buy a vintage car and feel suitably nourished. But why am I swapping to Turismo all of a sudden? I’m equally as content with Starfield4, which (remarkably) still entertains me greatly and somehow has plenty still to offer. In this case, it’s the lack of a level cap and my base enjoyment of the acquisition loop that provides the space, but the recent arrival of mods lends fresh momentum. Just capping all enemies above Lvl 70 - a ludicrously simple change that should have been an options switch - has renewed the stealth challenge and made exploring installations worthwhile fun. And that’s without the new Trackers Alliance stuff. But alas, life can’t all be stealthily killing baddies in space. Some sense of exhilaration is required, hence turning to high-speed driving.
I feel somewhat blessed to be playing Starfield on console, as I’m pretty sure that on PC, I’d be installing mods with such wild abandon that it’s unlikely I’d ever play anything else. Yet in combination with Gran Turismo, I face the terrifying possibility that I don’t have to start any more games for fucking ages. I could quite conceivably be happy for years swapping between the two until I exhaust them, such is the degree of comfort they bring. What worries me is that I have those other two really good, really cool games to play. Games that I know I’ll have a wonderful time with, yet that nagging sense of having to sit through intros and tutorials and hand-holdy opening chapters weighs down on my jaded, increasingly habitual self. I mean, I’ve just installed Zenless Zone Zero on the PlayStation 5 and have Flintlock queuing on my beloved Series S. I did actually manage to get through Zenless Zone Zero’s tutorial and am positively relishing the idea of Flintlock5 fulfilling my 7/10 Soulsbourne fantasies, but I know Kazunori’s used car dealership demands a once-over. And, y’know, just a few laps in my newly-acquired Alpine A220 (1968)6. And then maybe a ragged-edge blast in some modern high-end Le Mans machinery and before I know it, I’m tackling a custom 20-lap Nürburgring race in a 60’s Mini because it’ll get me just enough cash to buy something out of the Legends dealership and oh look, it’s 2am.
Of course it should be noted that both Starfield and Gran Turismo 7 appeal to my perverse love of acquiring and collecting things. There’s something curiously magical about the balance between the cerebral exploration, observation and planning of Starfield’s stealthing with Turismo’s input discipline, raw thrills and appeal to rhythm. The same promise of acquisition isn’t quite there with Infinite Wealth or Returnal, even though I have always been a big fan of buying needless amounts of cologne for my Yakuza inventories. And yet, the path to being able to actually purchase said cologne is cloudy. Why would I risk a play session on uncertainty, fearing interminable cutscenes and forced linear mission shenanigans, when I can raid some Spacer installations and come away with more plushies for my Starfield bed? And while I hope you feel some pity for the games I’m yet to start, it’s those which I abandoned that perhaps deserve the most sympathy. Elite Dangerous being one obvious candidate where I put enough hours in to realise I could probably commit to it quite happily and exclude everything else, which meant I had to stop immediately. Similarly No Man's Sky is a constant, regretful presence in my conscience. Despite a deeply sincere promise to myself that I’ll restart from scratch eventually,7 each round of bountiful new stuff pushes that promise back into the periphery. I assure myself that I need a real drought of nothing to play, a fully cleared deck, to give No Man’s Sky the commitment it deserves. But you know what? I’m going to make it number three on my list of four Dadgames with an empty promise to definitely play the fully updated version at some point.
There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, where a significant bunch of my gaming buddies were wedded entirely to World Of Warcraft. Over nearly two years of solid play on their part, I watched them ignore so many lovely titles for the sake of gear raiding or grinding mounts or whatever, that I felt like I was in some separate social outgroup.8 That scared me, as I’d already retired from online multiplayer by that point. I’d been in the trenches of 1999-2001 Unreal Tournament mods and obsessively played them for long enough to get RSI in both wrists,9 and had little time for taking up the mouse again in order to pick thousands of plants for entire evenings or queuing to perform my 50th run at a 1/200-drop raid. Like Elite Dangerous, World of Warcraft haunted me as a monogame, threatening to dominate my gaming life. I could never let one thing consume all my time, yet hilariously I’m quite content with just two games doing that instead. It does warm my heart though, that some of those friends who gave up Halo multiplayer for World of Warcraft have found their dream Valhalla in Destiny, having given them a decade of what they always wanted in hybrid form, including the right to gripe about whatever shit was nerfed with each patch and bitch about whichever currency they couldn’t get enough of.10 People who know my tastes intimately were probably surprised I never ended up married to Day Z or its progeny. Rust being something that always sung to me but never convinced me to take it up. Somehow, I was always content watching other people struggle endlessly to define a place of sanctuary, only to have it all stolen and then lost in a server wipe. I’m fairly certain that for the time being, my multiplayer PvP days are long, long behind me and to be perfectly honest, I really do not miss it. I am therefore happy to have my fourth Dadgame be something solo, something offline. There’s a good chance that my fourth is yet to be found, either deep in the ever-exponential catalogues or in future release schedules. But who am I kidding? I know exactly what it is - Parasol Stars. No, it’s Gradius. No, Outrun 2. DEFENDER. Trials HD! No, it’s Ridge Racer 7, Disgaea, R-Type Final 3, Bangai-O, Hitman, NO! IT’S BUJINGAI. DEFINITELY BUJINGAI.11
So there. I don’t actually have a fourth Dadgame and there’s another podcast idea fucked right up. Thankfully though, I love games far too much to fall into endlessly cycling between four of them. Yet nonetheless, it feels terribly plausible that I probably could pick four series and live out the rest of my life quite happily playing them. In the 360/PlayStation 3 era, us hardcore gamers used to joke about the guys who bought FIFA and COD year in and year out, pausing only to take up a Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption for special occasions. And yet there you have that quartet in maximalist mainstream flavours. There must be a cohort of gamers with two decades and hundreds of thousands of hours in just those four IPs, so perhaps it’s not so strange that the enthusiast element might fall into a similar pattern. But in my case there’s also the lack of necessity, combined with the lack of time to play. In my industry years, you absolutely needed to have an opinion on the games in the current discourse, particularly the big guns. And really, you need to play them. But now, I have the luxury of being free of that, of not needing the necessary set of ready-to-go opinions on the previous quarter of AAA. I can just sneer from the sidelines while munging around crates for shit to keep. It almost becomes an obstinate point of pride to know nothing of Sony’s platform exclusive successes. Perhaps because I’m certain I had a better time indulging in my personal, quixotic and irreversibly entrenched habits. I do feel bad about ignoring my Switch, though. I’ll get through Breath Of The Wild one day, I promise!
[21]
Or was it five? Fuck. For the purposes of this piece, let's go with four.
I only have one, It Takes A Nation of Millions by Public Enemy. However I am fucking obsessed with finding new and old dance music and, as mentioned previously, am several years into a wandering jazz funk odyssey.
The laziness in not wanting to change discs, while refusing to pay premium digital prices, is absolutely a factor in my PlayStation 5 choices. Maybe all I need to do is put Turismo in its box and tape Infinite Wealth into the the machine. Funnily enough though, I still exhibit the same behaviour on an all-digital console.
Starfield isn’t actually It Takes A Nation Of Millions, as it’s more like Hits Five or Megabass 1. I mean, it could be Coldcut’s What’s That Noise. But really, I’m happier thinking of it as Paid in Full back-to-back with 3 Feet High And Rising but in actuality that’s just me kidding myself. It’s The Best Of The Art Of Noise.
Can you fucking believe I deleted Cyberpunk 2077 to make room for Flintlock? I know! What a dick. But I’m not scrubbing Hitman for anyone. No fucking way.
The Alpine A220 really is an absolute beauty if you fork out for racing softs. One of few cars that has you hooting with delight at how capable it is, and how you can feel reckless in pushing to the limit while keeping plenty of speed and momentum.
My No Man's Sky save was based in the vanilla launch content and logged hundreds of hours. I loved it at launch. I hated the hoo-hah and poisonous discourse around it, for what we got in the box was genuinely magical to me and a real jewel to treasure.
I actually had to resist significant amounts of peer pressure to avoid taking up World of Warcraft in the early months of that group's obsession. A year later, deep into Musou titles, Danmaku, open-world RPGs and console stealth games, I was so glad I held firm.
Look, when you’re on benefits, living with a small business man specialising in herbal products and have 512k broadband, shit is just going happen. And it’ll happen 12 hours a day until you become literally nocturnal. Best time of my life.
I am 100% certain there’s good mileage in patching specifically to cause community uproar as the deep metagame.
It's actually Ghost Recon: Breakpoint with the amazing mods I've made up in my head.