Randomly Mine: July 13th, 2019

Free to Play (Kind Of)

There’s a lot of reasons people doubt Free to Play games. Be it their monetization, perpetual grind, or lacking the visual appeal and polish of full-priced games. Of course, that last point has been diminishing with time as more and more big-budget studios and publishers have flocked to the free to play model with games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, Warface, etc.

I’ve never avoided Free to Play games because of these reasons, but very few of them have ever seen my PayPal account, and RaceRoom Racing Experience reminded me why.

RaceRoom’s a damn fine game. While made by another development team, it’s basically the closest we’re ever going to get to a GTR3 by SimBin & 10 Tackle Studios. It’s got phenomenal physics, audio, tracks, cars, etc. I love playing it and I’ll play more of it soon.

However, one pack for $4 is all I could give it in terms of financial support because of its business model.

The Premium Pack, IE, the one that gives you all 120+ Cars and 35 Tracks, is $110+ USD…

For 90% off.

Despite slashing down the total price of everything it includes by nearly 100%, it’s still more expensive than a Full Priced game almost guaranteed to feature more cars, tracks, features, and options, and this isn’t even accounting for future content this premium pack doesn't cover.

And it’s the same with almost every free to play game.

Blacklight Retribution? Great game. Loved playing it back in the day. Fast-paced arcade shooter that iterated on Tango Down and improved upon it while focusing on a platform more suited to PVP shooters. But you want a pack that includes some decent guns? $20+ USD.

Not a campaign, not an expansion, not an Indie Game, not a Sale Game. 

Some guns and maybe a charm.

I hate this crap.

Even the highly praised Warframe, a game I’ve made videos about praising, does this too with Steam Packs that are a complete joke. The Starter Bundle is $21.99 CAD, and for that you get 300 Platinum, Boosters, Weapon slots, items, and icons.

Rocket League, Risk of Rain 2, Dead by Daylight, DUSK, and many more cost that much for entire gameplay experiences.

Why can’t RaceRoom, Blacklight, Warframe, and so many others just have a version that’s effectively like buying a Full-Priced game? I get why they don’t them at launch when content’s light, the community’s small, and they’ve got work their way up to a complete experience. But why after they reach that point, couldn't they market the game as a full-title that just happens to have a free version that’s pretty engaging?

Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned but once I’ve bought a game, I’ve bought it, and I’m not the type of person that’s going to keep spending a lot of money for a little bit of content in a single-game repeatedly. I just can’t help but think of how that cost could go to other games that deserve it instead.

A G2A Regret

I’ll be honest, a couple months ago there some Disney published games that refused to go on-sale for years on Steam, and I have a quite consistent mantra that reads…

Fuck Disney.

So I got some cheap codes from this scummy site and left, can’t possibly be as bad as a mega-evil corp like Disney that has genuinely brought injustice and negative impact on an unimaginable scale.

And they’re not, but they’re still close enough to make me feel guilty.

Positivity from Nuclear Waste

I think I’ve even said this before, but fuck it. I’ve been meaning to make a video for some time about how “talent is non-linear.” About how Talent isn’t like an RPG Skill, or speedometer that increases one way while you’re doing your one thing. How writing, directing, acting, etc, is far more complicated than improving from bad to good.

And by god, is Chernobyl a perfect case in-point.

Whatever you think of the show, I don’t think there is any question that it’s superior to Scary Movie 4, Superhero Movie, The Hangover Part 2, and definitely better than the upcoming Charlies Angels.

Well, that’s what Chernobyl’s creator is credited with.

For a decade he’s writing jokes worthy of a pencil to the eye, and the next moment, is portraying one of the largest disasters in recorded history with such talent & ability it’s become a phenomena.

Either way, how he manages go back to writing Charlies Angels after that, is definitely a talent.