I did a sin

 

I am a fossil. A relic. An antiquarian. An ancient. An old fogey. An irate man shouting at the clouds. Whenever I play New Vegas, you bet I pick the 'I'm slow to embrace new ideas' option. But every now and again the needle pushes itself forward, without my say so. Or with my say-so, but the cajoling is heavy. Largely I like to consider myself immune to the snake like charm of marketers, being fully cognizant of the worm like grip of 'guidance' those creeps try to employ- and perhaps it's in begrudging knowledge of that which I made my great shame. Or perhaps I am just a shameful person. Either way I would like to admit that great shame in front of all of you today, and then maybe chat a little about my great shame for the room. Savvy? Good.

So you may have picked up on my manners of playing throughout the years but I've never outright stated it. To be clear, I like to primarily game on my PC. I used to keep that specifically for older games and RPGs, things that my relic of a system wouldn't have any trouble with (although I modded my Skyrim playthroughs so much they ran like slideshows!) But around about my incredible choppy playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake I decided a change had to be made, and then last year I totally decked out my PC and now I use it to play literally anything. However I do also have a Series X and a Switch- for which I use mostly at times when I'm doing stuff on my PC such that it can't also play a game. Or if I'm not home. And it was here that my issues began.

You see, I recently blogged about the upcoming Elden Ring release and it's significance to myself. The whole 'playing through previous games' predicament was slightly muddied by the annoying fact that Dark Souls 1 places a lot of it's most important items behind Covenant rewards, which can only be achieved through online play. Frustrating as that is, I find myself disadvantaged even greater by the fact I had run out of 'online membership' for my Xbox and simply refused to get it updated because I was busy elsewhere. Which is why I was quite surprised to find that Xbox Gold had been totally rebranded to 'Game Pass Core' when I was signing up... typically I would avoid the thing like the plague for that naming convention alone, but I didn't want to miss out... but then- because I was diving into purchasing options I'd never experienced before I started looking at the other options and then...

As embarrassing as it is to say, for the first time I actually sat down and purchased Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Yes, you heard me right- I haven't actually played with Game pass before and caved in on something of a whim this time around- and thought I don't exactly intend to keep it as a recurrent subscription all year round- I have to confess that this really was the kind of service I should have been involved in from the start. All I really wanted was online access, but it hardly took four minutes of browsing the Game Pass store before several dozen games I wanted to try but never got around to stood out to me and I'm fully intending on knocking them down my list. Which is really what the entire purpose of the thing is- and I sound like a cruddy commercial saying it. (Crap! Balls! There- that should chase away the sponsors!)

Because to be utterly honest with you all- was I ever really going to sit down and play Callisto Protocol? The pretty looking, but not quite successor to Dead Space? I mean I love Dead Space, but I love Dead Space as... you know... an Alien send up! Callisto Protocol just brought Melee combat and... Karen Fukuhara. Don't get me wrong, I love Karen Fukuhara in my game but... not enough to drop a sixty. But if you offer it to me for alongside my subscription? Why wouldn't I say yes- that game's got Karen Fukuhara! And that's really the sweetspot target demographic for games that makes the product such a tantalising proposition.

Now I'm still very much 'old school' in that there are a certain breed of games I want to have and own for myself so that I can pick them up at any time. I don't want to have some overshore sever farm decide what I'm playing- and I get that mood to strike up a FromSoftware Souls playthrough at all strange times of the year. Also I would never do that to ATLUS because I simply respect them too much to not give them my money straight up. I would pay them a monthly wage if I could- I love them. But Lords of the Fallen? Pff, I don't respect them! I've literally never managed to complete the original game, and I'm pretty sure I only got it on games with Gold anyway so I've literally never spent a dime on this franchise. (That actually makes me feel bad. I should probably buy a DLC or something. I won't. But I should.)

In fact, I do wonder if the Gamepass promise doesn't veer into the territory of too good to be true, based both on my now first-hand account and the things that I've read about in various coverage piece over the years. On my own account- The price of a single AAA game covers about 5 months of Gamepass. I, and bare in mind I'm a lot more active than your typical gamer, could probably dish out about 10 triple AAA games in that time. Forty if I'm hustling. (And particularly unoccupied in those months.) On the outside, there's pretty decent evidence to believe that the lack of growth in Gamepass is what put the strain on Xbox forcing them to close a studio who game them an Award Winner. It seems to be a product that demands perpetual growth to be considered successful and... that's not always possible.

So for the time being I've joined the legions of plebs who are smart with the way they spend their money- and I have to say- not loving how it feels. Even the slightest amount shift in the winds is wont to get my Rheumatism acting up, and my lumbago. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't currently have about 200 Gb of game that I'm going to gorge on over the next... actually I have two weeks off; wow, I'm going to be drowning! Still, I doubt that Xbox could afford to buy exactly my taste of game all year around so consider this a temporary courtship to a brand I'm still pretty sure is currently afflicted with a terminal illness. Sure there's a kink for that, but I'm rarely proud to boast I don't know it's name.