Off The Clock: My Own Personal Investigation Team

The first MGS game I ever played was 4 and I kept getting spotted and killed and it was just not enjoyable (Especially with all the cut scenes). I played it a again a few years later on easy when I could play the game at my pace and it subsequently became one of my favourite ever games/stories.

@smgb25: Because @austin_walker doesn't plug it himself, I will. You should definitely listen to his RPG podcast, Friends at the Table. I'm listening through it now, and Austin DMs like no one I've ever seen before. Every time I listen I get inspired and want to run a campaign of my own.

Coincidentally I just finished the Consulting Detective-inspired holiday special episodes of that podcast, and it was thrilling, even as a silent spectator. Mixing the mystery with ties the PCs have to the world made for some great conflicts and character moments.

Back in high school, I had a friend who would bring over his PS2, hook it up on a TV next to mine, and we would both play games at the same time. This is how I played through MGS1, 2 and FFXII and it's probably the reason enjoy them so much and think back to fondly on them.

I also got the most enjoyment out of Asura's Wrath by bringing to my college campus and playing it with a FULL CROWD watching the entire spectacle. Applause and everything!

Edit: Oh, also fighting games! It wasn't until the past year or two that I was actually able to get into fighting games because I made from who were in pretty deep, but were willing to teach and even when I lost were still fun to play against. P4A was also helpful since it took something I liked and threw it into a fighting game.

For some reason when I read 'investigation team' in the title I thought of this:

Austin, I'm wondering if you've heard of another board game called "T.I.M.E Stories" that has come out very recently? After reading this, it seems like something that would be right up your alley. Much like SH:CD, it's a very narrative driven co-operative deduction game. It's perhaps a bit more simplified, but still absolutely dripping with immersive theme that really sucks you in. I think it's one you should definitely look into once you've finished your time with Sherlock.

http://www.spacecowboys.fr/time-stories
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/146508/time-stories

Great read Austin, I mean it.

As far as video games go there have been 2 cases in particular (one unexcpected and more so too) in recent years where playing a game with different settings has dramatically changed how I view it. There were plenty of RPGs over the years that allowed me to role play from distinct perspectives, but that I feel like that would be a small essay :P. So here goes.

The first one is a pretty obvious example of Xcom:EU. Playing through it on impossible+ironman was just such a unique tense experience for the first half of it. With odds stacked so massively against you and having to exploit every bit of my mechanical knowledge of the game and how the AI works. It took 15+ tries just to get past the first 2 months with a non devastated team. And while during the middle doldrums the game became as rote as it is normally. At the end something that later surprised me happened. Seeing that final cut scene that I already saw 3 or 4 times before, this time around it actually felt awesome, exhilarating and relieved. I felt on top of the world, I felt like my team actually went through hell and came back. The volunteer's self sacrifice that seemed so melancholy before became a "fuck yeah!" moment. Going so far as to post a screenshot of the Xcom drop ship flying away that before seemed meaningless fluff was now totally badass in that Die Hard kind of way.

My second such experience was far more unexpected. Batman: Arkham City. Playing through that game normally was basically a Batman power fantasy trip, you're this badass Batman, predator of the night yada-yada, criminals fear you, you give no fucks, lay out your opponents flat and keep on rolling. You are the king of the night and Arkham City is your personal criminal playground petri dish. And I loved it, the smoothness of combat (that reached it's pinnacle in that entry) went a long way. So really liking that game I had an itching sometime later that year to replay it as I sometimes do when there is not much else on the table. But this time around on the hard newgame+ difficulty (you take much more damage, enemies are constantly armed with a different array of weapons, no parry notifications, etc)

Oh boy. That was a ride I did not envision. The more I dove into it the more it seemed like a completely different game. Emotionally more then anything actually. The feelings and vibes of the badass and somewhat unnecessarily cruel Batman took a 180 turn. People gave Batman hell, the danger of dying was real and constant, the major villains would beat you into the ground, even a group of random thugs was potentially dangerous if you dropped your guard and relaxed too much. Guns tore you apart in 2 seconds. Batman was no longer lording over this night city/prison, he was surviving. All that damage modeling on the suit finally meant something real. Batman wasn't cruel in his breaking of peoples bones, he was doing what he fucking had to, because if he didn't he would die, and criminals were out for his blood plain and simple. Suddenly all those actions were 100% justified. Sorry bro I don't give a fuck if I broke your arm, boo-hoo, you and your buddies were trying to turn me into mashed beef and would have done it if I didn't put you down with the maximum force and efficiency possible. Absolute best boss fight in the game? Mr Freeze. oh-em-geee how I hated it and then I loved it. Normally when fighting him you would have to do 4-5 different types of take downs to win and that was fun and interesting. Enter his newgame+ mode. You had to do around 10 totally different and unique take downs on him and he would 2 shot you if he ever had a bead on you. Doing that for the first time felt like a special kind of hell, Batman actually had to pull out every trick in the book he knew out of his ass to just scrape by till the end and survive. Not only your knowledge of the games mechanics were tested, Batman was tested you were up against a truly dire situation surviving on a wing and a prayer while at the same time trying to think of new ways to attack your foe as he closed off previous avenues of approach every time. After finally triumphing you get the in game cutscene of Batman breaking through Mr Freeze's helmet with his fist and just continuing to punch him. And you know what was the best part. I felt like that. I wanted to just beat the shit out of his stupid face for making me go thought that and trying to kill me for no other reason then refusing to play nice. Every blow felt like honest to goodness justice/vengeance/release all blurred and blended together. Fuck you Mr. Freeze, fuck you!

And then there is that scene closer towards the end of the game (totally mundane and forgettable during the normal game) when you get to the exit of Arkham City and Hugo is talking to you on a big screen in that closed off room as more and more security forces file into the room and surround Batman with guns, knives, stun batons and shields ready. And Batman just stands there listening to Hugo as they surround him. That moment was the moment of the game for me. As the soldiers filed in and surrounded Batman, I was planning, Hugo was talking, Batman was mapping out his future moves in my head. When things pop off, I will electrocute the armored guy to my right, batarang the gun wielding soldier at my back, freeze the soldier with the shield at 4 o'clock, then grapple and launch into the knife guy to my left and then it's on. Hugo stopped talking, but I was only half listening anyway. Guards started to move, things popped off, Batman executed his plan, exactly like it went thought my head just a few seconds earlier, to a T, a group of heavily armed soldiers lay at my feet all around the room. I. was. Batman.

Aside from my deep desire to find a group online with space for one more player in the d20/etc category, finding a regular group to jump into some co-op style board games (battle star house on haunted hill, Arkham horror) has always been a, shall we say, pipe dream of mine.

I simply adore those kind of games and sadly I've entered the "all my friends got married so eh, we get to play dnd sometimes and boardgames maybe once every 3 months". This +my being the only fan of such games really..

Its good to see someone on this site with an interest in them, and a fairly positive response too it. Despite the slight 'woe is me" nature of that first bit of my comment, I advice anyone able to get into this sort of thing. Online might be next to impossible to do cold (like you gotta know someone already) but offline? If you've got the friends to get together, go for it.

I love imagining this. Audience Reacts To Asura's Wrath.

@tennmuerti That's a great Batman story! It's cool when increasing the difficulty makes you more involved in the proceedings. I started playing games on Hard more this last year, but a lot of the time it just results in more HP and attack power for the enemies. Games where they remove crutches or enemies gain new attack patterns are much more entertaining.

If you do like solving mysteries with friends playing a board game, I highly recommend playing T.I.M.E Stories. It is incredibly difficult to say anything specific about the contents of both adventures without spoiling anything, but imagine playing a cooperative choose your own adventure game with friends that involves time travel. There are only 2 stories out yet (base game + marcy case), but those feel very different, have different designers attached to them and overall seem to be as varied in content as Dr.Who shows. You might want to bring Vinny to the table if you can - I am certain that you would greatly enjoy this.

As for the question, since I do enjoy stealth games with instant fail conditions, playing shooters on hardest difficulty greatly enhance the frustration, but also sense of accomplishment for me. I just recently re-installed Syndicate (the shooter) and started playing solo through the co-op missions. It is actually really enjoyable to methodically inch forward and experience the game more as a puzzle.

Last year I ended up restarting Dragon Age Inquisition with a different character class, but I don't know that I would say it "greatly" improved my time with the game. But, you know, semantics.

Honestly, I feel like I run into the opposite situation a lot in games. I'll spend hours and hours ignoring the main story in games, and instead just explore, do side quests, etc, and then when I eventually get back to the main story...I don't like them as much. But I think that's more a case where I enjoy those games mechanically, but the story and mission structure built around those mechanics are not so great.

I know there's something, but I just can't think of it...

Even though it's a game I still wouldn't say I loved, I think Dishonored fits. I tried playing that game like how I play most stealth games. Be quiet, try to take out people nonlethally, avoid detection, etc. But given a lot of things about that game that would take me way too long to describe, I was not having any fun at all playing that game that way. So I decided to just kill everyone in my way and not worry about being detected, and I ended up at least having some fun with it, even if I was still ultimately disappointed in the game.

For me a big revolution in the way I play games came from going back into old games I played with no outside information and using cheats and FAQs to break down the overall structure of the game. Lacking any outside information, the experience of playing a game imparts a much greater feeling of direct personal investment and agency, since there isn't any outside influence or preconceived game-sequence to in any way dictate your actions as a player. However, in reality, additional information only serves to illuminate the ways in which the veneer of interactivity of the game gives way to the underlying continuous structure of the curated experience. With perfect sequence information and ease of mechanical manipulation, the moment-to-moment experience of interacting with the game becomes divorced from the synthetic gestalt of authorial intentions, becoming instead a purely mechanical process performed for its own sake rather than for some imaginary benefit. Only from such a position of understanding the overall structure of the game's depth and breadth can the player create truly original goals and methods of play within the fundamental game structure, for example speedrunning, nuzlocke runs, glitch hunting, etc. which, to me, are equally as significant as creative expressions as the theoretical "perfect run" that the developers intended.

@bladededge: There is a healthy community of players on boardgamegeek.com that play games regularly using Tabletop Simulator and have good things to say about it. I haven't jumped in yet as I have a couple of regular groups, but that might be an option for you. I own TS and would be glad to jump in with you if you wanted to put a group together from GB and take a run at something like Betrayal.

Regarding changing goals:

I went into Dragon Age Inquistion planning to play a villainous elf bent on revenge against humans. However I found myself gradually shifting my goal from revenge on humans to a working to improve relations between humans and elves. Basically went from murdering psycho hellbent on revenge to a advocate for peace and diplomacy.

Also in Dragon Age I originally trying to 100% clear each area before mving on. The game went from being cool to a chore and I was thinking about setting it down and moving on to something else. Instead I started ignore everything except main quests and companion quests and the pacing went from tedium to enjoyable. Just by ignoring all the map icons the game became an order of magnitude more fun.

@nerdbloggerdan: Huh, you know I had been going about it from the other angle, the 'find a rpg group and..". I had never even though of BGG.

Thanks for the response (and as a counter to my pessimism hopefully someone else gets some help from it as well!

Oh that silly Gracie

Super rad to see Galatea get a name-check on here.

More Gracie the cat pictures in future Off The Clock articles please.

There are two things that come to my mind about playing games differently. The first one is that when Dragon Age came out, I played as a mage. The game got to be a walk in the park until the fight with Flemeth. I had to turn the difficulty down to be able to finish the game. I didn't want to do that but I had to in order to enjoy the game. The same thing happened when I played Inquisition. I was a ranger this time but I had to once again turn the difficulty down to beat one of the dragons found in the game.

The other game I've played differently was MGSV. I loved doing everything as stealthy as possible and only engaging in combat when I absolutely had to. It was so much fun and so tense when people were coming towards me and hoping I didn't miss a headshot with my tranq gun. I also did my best to kill as little as possible but did it if I absolutely needed to. It was some of the most fun I've had with a game in a long time.

One major change for me has involved playing games where you create your own character.

It used to be that, given a character creation tool, my first instinct would be to recreate myself as best as possible. This would also lead to me following old patterns - always being the "up-close-and-personal" character, and making choices based on what I would do in the moment.

There was a point - probably around when I became more invested in social justice issues and recognizing of my own privilege - where I started to think more about how a created character's various traits (gender, race, class, weapon choice) all come together and tell you various things about their personality. I've been using this to then inform my choices in-game. The most recent example has been in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where my character is a female Qunari Warrior. The in-game plot is that the Qunari character is a person who has strayed from the Qun and become a mercenary. As such, I tend to pick dialogue options that show her discomfort with the religious aspects of the Inquisition, and her ability to survive without any sort of real "home".

In short, I'm trying to play a specific character more than just myself, which has had the double effect of broadening my horizons gameplay-wise (I've invariably been a different class in each Dragon Age game) and allowing me to explore in-game perspectives that are slightly outside the normative "white male" ones. It's really improved my experience of these games, because it adds on the personal goal of figuring out who my character really is throughout in addition to whatever goals actually come from in-game.

Changing Goals:

I enjoyed the Super Robot Wars series more when I stopped upgrading, letting the units play to their strengths and maximize the limited resources of an otherwise incredibly easy franchise.

You pose an interesting question. Asking to take a look in retrospect and examine if at any point changing your focus/goals in a game improved your experience. The one that I wanted to jump on was your difficulty question, seeing that when I was younger I always played games on the easiest difficulty and cheated quite a bit. Now that I'm older, I see myself as "above" cheating (Thats not a comment on the people who do...) and have since always started to play games on a harder difficulty. But while I feel I get a better sense of accomplishment, I also feel that it is simply a different experience to the "easy with cheats" run through of that I would do in my youth. No, what I want to talk about is something different. I want to talk about a little unknown gem of a game called Minecraft and how it helped to shape me as a gamer.

Nah, I am joking. About the unknown gem thing, not however about Minecraft. It was a game that helped open my eyes. There is something that has stuck with me for a bit. I heard it on this site, dont remember from who unfortunately, (It was being quoted from an outsider.) but it was the question "How do I know when I am satisfied?". And while the person was mocked, it kinda dawned on me, Minecraft helped answer that question for me as a gamer. When I first popped on Minecraft, I had the whole "Play to Win" mentality. Seeing games as something to conquer. But when I started way back when the beta released, there was no "winning" Minecraft. There was no Ender Dragon to slay, hell there werent even beds. Yet somehow people where having the time of their life with this game, and it made me a little mad. I wanted that, but how do I get it?

Now I was used to games telling me how to have fun. Some of my first gaming memories were of Streets of Rage and it has an arrow just pointing where to go when you finish beating all the baddies on screen. Minecraft didnt even have so much as a tutorial back then, so I started how everyone should. I punched down some trees, made myself a little dirt house, and simply marveled at the world around me...the directionless, aimless, goalless world around me. And I realized I would have to find my own fun. For a while simply collecting things and figuring out how things worked occupied my time enough. But when I had gathered everything and no longer needed to look at the Minecraft wiki, I was stuck. I mean obviously you build things, but what? I moved out of the dirt hut and into a proper little house. (I called it my cupcake house.) Made a little cellar for storage. But beyond that I just didnt know what to do. So I then realized I would have to change how I was looking at this. Expecting the game to tell me what to do with it to enjoy it wouldnt cut it, I would have to find a way to make my own fun.

And try I did. Starting with the cellar I expanded it to a cave system near my house, making mining a lot easier. Made a dock for fishing. A lighthouse lit by Netherrack. A huge bridge expanding my reach to the surrounding islands. Then I decided I was done with that dinky cave system near my house and built a proper mining station with a proper mine. Then I reasoned that if I am going to spend the time building this stuff I should make it look pretty and cared more about aesthetics. On and on this went. But I realized I had learned something from this game. How to take a game, and have fun with it. Not just the fun that I was supposed to have, but the fun I could find in it. And I carried these lessons with me into future games. Changing the way I looked at sandbox games as a whole and allowing me to have a whole nother level of fun.

I still play Minecraft every now and then, not as much as I used to no doubt, but its a game that will stick with me. Because it helped me answer the question I didnt even know I had ever asked. And that question being...how do I know when I am satisfied?

Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?

I hate loot games like Diablo. I love loot games like Dungeons & Dragons, where every item with more power comes at the cost of something else, often how much it weighs; it's why fat rolling is a thing in Dark Souls, to balance the potential god-tier damage and defense the player can achieve. In Diablo and other games that you'd typically call loot games, you'll constantly find new gear that is just a straight upgrade over the thing you're currently using; it's just better in every category. It's designed to manipulate you into thinking you're getting more powerful, but you're not, since the enemies increase in power by the same amount. The numbers just get higher, and it hides the repetition of those games.

I never fell for that trick. I see right through it, and the manipulation turns me off to those sorts of games. With Tales From the Borderlands coming out, my friends kept telling me that I need to get into Borderlands 2, so I tried to look at it differently. If I imagine the health bars and numbers aren't there, I realize that it's basically the same amount of bullets/time that it takes to kill Locust in Gears of War, and I love Gears of War. Sure, maybe the combat isn't quite as good in Borderlands 2, but if I just ignore the numbers, I can enjoy a comedic co-op FPS with my friends.

Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?

In Oblivion I found out that part of the fan base like to play taking screenshots and using pose mods to create screenshots, where they character showing are doing something, some times just for fun, for the screenshot art or because they are creating a story behind it.

I liked that a lot and end up doing that too, this, along with mods, made me play Oblivion for much longer, in fact I only stopped playing when Skyrim was around the corner (I kind had to rush to the end, because I didn´t advance much in the main quest due all this poses and shots) and now keep doing the same on Skyrim.

I even start to not only think about how would be my character in greater depth, but also I created my own companions with their own backstories and using them to make group shots. This end also influence the mods I use, which mostly are either body mods (to improve the characters, add new races, hairs, ect...), pose mods and lots and lots of clothes and armor mods (for potential shots) along with some graphical improvement mods. To be fair, right now my Skyrim and my Oblivion, had so many mods that they kind looked like a jrpg (I even have one which add a school....).

Another case was playing the Ironman mode in Paradox games, which removes the save/load leaving you only with autosave and save (but no load) this creates a very interessing and tense play where instead of reloading if something goes wrong, I had to deal with it and this created many good moments.

Also talking about Paradox games, I found out that I did like a lot playing was someone vassal in CK2. Dont know why, but the concept of playing as some ally and going up and down trying to put down fires (which often caused by my own sovereign) very fun.

First time through Skyrim I didn't "get it" and just went through the two main arcs as quickly as possible. My second play-through, years later, was a much more enjoyable experience because I made a concrete decision to find out what else the game had to offer in terms of systems and quests.

Hitman Blood Money! I played this game beat it, loved it. Years later I bought it again on PC and decided to see if I can pull it off as a true assassin would, completely no alerts, always looking like an accident, and making sure I walk out with my suit every time. Nothing more rewarding than getting a perfect score after carefully planning an assassination. Changing the focus from just beating the game to truly mastering it made me get a lot more replay-ability out of it.

When I shifted my goal of playing Dragon Age Inquisition to a goal of wasting my time with better, more interesting open world RPGs, my experience was certainly improved.

Real talk though: I got a lot more enjoyment out of Pokemon X version after digging into the more nitty-gritty metagame optimization aspects of it. For a series that is still unquestionably aimed at kids, it's pretty obvious that the developers at Game Freak are well aware of the older fanbase and have made the competitive aspects of those games a lot more accessible without crazy internet guides.

Aww damn I thought you'd been playing Scotland Yard. It's a favourite board game of mine but everyone else I know hates it.

I've never really played much of a GTA game apart from fooling around with the sandbox. This trend was set to continue into the current generation when I heard about GTA V, but just one thing changed it. Not the online mode, so hotly anticipated for sweet heists and PvP racing and so on, but the addition of a real first-person mode, which would let players experience the stories (both built-in and emergent) of the world in a more direct way than before. I decided that I needed to explore a big, living area in first-person again, but I didn't want to just mess about in the game. So I also decided to finish the story entirely in that mode as well, to see what cool situations that brought me.

From that first moment in the prologue I committed to playing it like I would a first-person RPG and it was really incredible how much it changed things. The shooting is pretty tough for me with everything turned off, but it feels right. (At least you can aim down the sights.) Talking to people, even though there isn't much in the way of dialogue choice, has much more weight as a means to deliver plot. Using your phone is almost real. The driving is both harder and more terrifying than ever, especially when things start to go wrong. You stop being quite so unconcerned about pedestrians. And there are little things as well, that you might never think of. Top of my list of Things To Experience in GTA V First-Person:

- Get hit by a car (and survive)

- Find or buy a BMX and cycle around the place bunnyhopping onto and over cars, people, and walls

- Put on sunglasses or a mask

- Get in a car chase where you have to shoot someone in another car while driving (using Aim & Shoot controls this is toughhh)

- Chase a bag-stealer on foot until you catch them

- Jump off something high (ideally with a parachute)

- Drive as many different vehicles as you can and enjoy the work put into the various dashboards/car sounds, as well as the different blind spots when you're trying to shoot something out the window

I played through the whole story in first-person as much as the game lets you (more than 95% I'd say, a few cars don't have back windows etc. so you get an outside view when looking back) and it was such a supremely satisfying experience. I still go back to it and just mess around or try to pick up weird events (like that lady who's abducted by the Lost in the Vinewood hills). I'm still finding cool, surprising things, especially with how far they went when implementing the first-person stuff.

I'm just still really excited about playing this game this way and it's kind of silly given how old it is now, but man it is good. I know I would have never bothered with the game if not for their decision to add this, and I'm so glad they did.

Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?

Staying alive and competitive instead of getting a "win".

At 15 years young I played any game with a competitive atmosphere for the past 7 years. I craved a "win" more than improving my play and was frustrated without it. The Battlefield series was my exemplar of forcing a "win" and having a terrible experience. You can run through barbed wire and force your "win" in Battlefield or stay alive and battle...the field. Staying alive in a frenzy or one on one has given me an oozing feeling of my heels on the edge of a cliff (always exciting). I never feel like I'm losing if I'm trying my best and battling with competitive purpose. Staying alive and competitive turned me from a "win" spike seeking junky to a strategic berserker (greatly improved).

@austin_walker, I haven't asked myself this before and I learned something about myself. Thank you for this question and the article, I enjoyed them greatly.

P.S. Please keep writing.

My board game group just finished up SH CD a few months ago. It's incredible. Don't be discouraged for getting things wrong in the case. The game trains you to be a better detective. We were terrible at first and by the end were solving almost every aspect of each case and nearly matching Sherlock's score. Not that they were easy by any means. In fact, they get even harder. But the honing of your skills is so rewarding. Would love to hear more as you get further along.

After watching the Persona 4 Endurance run in it's entirety 3 times, I decided to finally play P4 myself. I wanted to see all the social link stories so I followed a Max Social Link guide and really enjoyed my experience.

Some time after that, I decided to look into Persona 3. I decided this time I would go for a more fluid experience, spending time with the characters that interested me and managing relationships on my own. I found it surprisingly stressful. The completionist in me knew I was being suboptimal (gasp!) and that I was going to miss out on lots of things. It ended up burning me out entirely.

I went back to it a year later, this time once again following a Max Social Link guide, and absolutely loved it. Persona 3 is now on a short list of special games that gave me something to take with me after I stopped playing.

And if I didn't shift my focus and try again, I would have missed that experience entirely.

Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?

I started playing MGSV in the same way I would approach a typical stealth game in the mold of Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored, etc. I would take a really long time setting up my infiltration route just so, and then would bail out and quickload if something went wrong. The grading at the end of each mission only fueled my own tendencies in this direction, and I found myself not making much progress, and not having much fun.

Then I stopped myself and decided that while I would still carefully set up an infiltration, I would only load when the game forced me to on death or otherwise failing a mission. Even when things went totally pear-shaped, I'd just switch from the tranquilizer to the machine gun and roll with it. I didn't expect this to work; a stealth build in Deus Ex almost always gets mowed down if caught in open combat, after all. But instead MGSV proved to not only be robust to abrupt changes in playstyle, but it thrived in it, showing that its staggering quantity of gameplay systems were matched by a fluidity of movement and interaction between those systems (as a programmer, I'm still shocked that they pulled this off). After making this switch, I had about the most fun I've had with a game this year.

What frustrates me here is that it felt like I was swimming upstream to overcome my existing habits and unlock this experience. I don't blame MGSV for habits I picked up in other games. But I do look at quantitative goals like the post-mission grading and SH:CD's "Beat Sherlock" objective, and wonder whether they guide players toward play, or a more Calvinist sense of work and achievement. In different games like Minecraft or Fallout, I might prefer work, but I wish MGSV had instead known that it is best as play, and had not steered me so hard toward the rat-race.

I can't think of anything super significant to answer your question at the moment, though I'm sure something will pop into my head at some point, and I'll head back here when that happens. For now, I have a fairly recent example, but it wasn't the most impactful thing in the world.

Pokemon Picross for the 3DS is a free-to-play nightmare. It is wrought with timers and after the initial handout at the beginning of the game, it eeks out its paid currency extremely slowly. That said, not only does the game offer a workaround of these systems by paying for it, it offers a complete workaround of these systems once you invest a certain amount of money into it. Once you've spent about the price of a full game (around 30-35 dollars) the energy meter becomes infinite and the game gives you the paid currency for free (I haven't quite gotten to that point yet, so I'm not sure how much it actually gives out) and you can play the game like a real-ass video game. And when you do that, it actually does play that way! Which is far different from a Farmville or other F2P system, where once you break the progression by spending money, you realize that the entire game is nothing but a treadmill and spending money to run on that treadmill a little faster for a while is entirely meaningless.

Once I "bought" Pokemon Picross, it became an enjoyable game for me, whereas before, it was really truly upsetting. I wish more F2P games had a ceiling on the amount they expect you to spend, so that you could eventually buy the damn game and play it for real like you can in this case.

This continues to be an amazing column.

As for the reader question: With the launch of Diablo 3, I tried out the "you-only-live-once" Hardcore mode and have never looked back. Diablo is the Lord of Terror, and introducing permadeath to the mix makes that terror very real. I've since become hooked on trying other games (like Skyrim, Far Cry 2, and any ARPG that comes across my desk) with high-stakes runs. Far Cry 2 feels tailor-made for such an approach, as the gameplay is forgiving enough (as long as you have a buddy on standby to bailout) and the world's Darwinist slant makes a "survival of the fittest" run feel right at home.

Going hardcore has made me think a lot about how games treat failure, especially while employing a narrative that involve toppling a seemingly unstoppable Big Bad. There's something slightly unfulfilling about defeating my rival once and getting a victory cutscene while knowing there are few hundred deaths along the way that we're just supposed to pretend didn't happen. We were beaten fair and square -- where's the villain's parade? While it's certainly not a great fit for every game, playing with a single life can do whole lot to make a supposedly epic struggle actually earn that title.

I realized that Bethesda games were good once I realized that I should stop playing the game they sold me and make it into the game I wanted.

That's a smug answer but I also really mean it. You were right, Austin, straight up fuck being the Dovahkiin. I had no interest in learning the words of power or whatever and fighting a big dragon that drops meteors on you. I just want to break into peoples' houses at night, steal their pots, transmute them into gold and put them back as priceless jewelry, all while trying to keep the fact that I'm a powerful witch a secret from the street urchin I took in when she asks for an allowance and all I have is gems and bars of gold.

Honestly, playing like that reminded me of when I was a kid playing Super Mario 64. Sure, I can rush through that game in an afternoon now, but I only really "beat" it as a kid after several years. Most of the time I spent playing that game was just hanging out in the castle, seeing what I could interact with and talking to NPCs, even if they said the same things over and over. When I think about it, I had way more fun burning my ass on the torches in the castle basement and trying to carry a tiny wiggler around a mountain than I ever did killing thirty bandits in a dark fort so I could press E over their box and manage my encumbrance. I'm not saying that to mean "fuck new games" either- I also enjoyed that more than Super Mario World, where the world map is just a glorified list of action stages.

Honestly, sometimes I worry that there's a strange disconnect between immersion and freedom nowadays. Skyrim tries to give players the freedom to do anything they want. but instead of leaving things open-ended it provides you with possibilities that are many but ultimately finite. Despite my best efforts, in interacting with the plot, my character is written in a certain fixed way, and I feel more locked in than when I was playing as characters that couldn't say anything. It reminds me of a strange complaint I heard a few years ago when The Evil Within was released- people weren't feeling immersed because their character wasn't reacting to the monsters.

This ended up being longer than I intended and I don't know if it went anywhere, but I guess that's my answer. Any game's an open world game if you try hard enough though, I guess is what I'm saying.

I don't think I would've enjoyed Her Story even close to as much as I did without taking notes in a real notebook. It was inconvenient, time-consuming, and even problematic at points (my handwriting is so bad I was misreading numbers), but that extra layer of artifice dramatically improved the experience.

Playing Last of Us on Hard helps maintain the feeling of struggle and suspense. For an extra kick, I never upgraded the weapons in ways that would reduce the tension of combat (reducing reload times, increasing magazine sizes).

Games tend to be built with pathways in mind. I find in many (though by no means all) instances, increasing the difficulty keeps me from fudging the mechanics in ways that end up making things less interesting. For what its worth, though, I also take an all-in approach to my games: headphones on, game audio only, as few distractions as I can manage. It seems only fair to the developers that I attempt to enjoy what they created as fully as possible.

RE reading The Boys by Gareth Ennis after reading it once and realizing things arent they way they seemed after the first go around. Was a intresting experience.

@austin_walker Despite it becoming more painful with each viewing, I watch the RiffTrax Star Wars Holiday Special every year. I'm also fond of The Magical Christmas Tree, The Ice Cream Bunny, and Santa's Village of Madness. All great horrendous Holiday treats.

Happy Life Day!

Great article @austin_walker !

In regards to your question.

There is perhaps only one time I can think of where Giant Bomb Quick coverage ever really led me away from a game I ended up really enjoying.

When it came out, Jeff was really vocally down on Double Dragon Neon. Having been a big fan of the originals he had a really strong preconception for what a Double Dragon game "should be" so to speak. Having loved the old Arcade/NES games myself though not nearly to the same degree he apparently was and knowing how deeply he understands those games, I figured he had it pegged for I would feel if I played it. So I didn't buy it for some time. I did download a demo of it off the PSN store, just because I still wanted to see for myself. While I did play through the entire demo, I just never really gave the game a fair shot as I had already determined that I wasn't going to like it.

But eventually a steep Steam sale happened and I thought, eh why not. Even though I had already played the demo and had decided it was bad, Jake Kaufman's tracks really really stuck with me to the point that I'd catch myself listening to them while doing work. I just wanted to hear them again in context. In particular this one, which I believe Ryan Davis noted enthusiastically in the Quick look for being a great song.

Really the whole Soundtrack is available for purchase on Jake Kaufman's bandcamp page if people are interested (along with Shovel Knight's and other great chiptune jams).

http://virt.bandcamp.com/album/double-dragon-neon

I don't know if enough time had passed or I was just feeling more open minded, but I decided to give the game another shot. If for no other reason to hear the music in the environment in which they were meant to be experienced.

But this time I tried to engage the game more on its own terms. And once I let go of those preconceptions I had of what a "Double Dragon" game should be, something happened. I stopped worrying so much about if the physics & controls truly captured the feel of the original (they definitely don't, but I think that's intentional). I stopped worrying about If RPG elements ruined a beat 'em ups difficulty balancing. I stopped worrying about whether DD:Neon's jocular tone itself was mocking the original DD games or just having a laugh with the player. And this time it really clicked for whatever reason and I really enjoyed it. The combat while deliberate definitely had a decent pace to it, the RPG elements eventually started to make their presence feel worthwhile but unlocking moves, and the game's silliness eventually won me over.

In fact I'd say it might now be my favorite Side Scrolling Beat 'em Up since maybe the 90's (not that there is a lot of those these days). That's something I never thought I'd ever say.

@austin_walker A game that I played recently that I really enjoyed that reminds me of the kinda "fake computer desktop, a reminder of older technology with AIM" is Emily is Away. It is not that long, maybe 45 mins, and you just pick choices in this AIM conversation with Emily, and how both you and Emily change through the years that pass in the game, feel like you would enjoy it if you have not already played it.

As for my answer, The main thing that I have with many open world RPG's (Dragon Age: Inquisition for ex) is the since that I need to do every quest to make sure that i get the "full" experience of the game. With Inquisition, once I gave up on trying to do every fetch quest, or every side quest, then I did enjoy that game a lot more, even thought the power system for that game can be frustrating.

Another answer to question for me could be stopping trying to collect all the trophies/achievements in a game. There was like a year between 2012-2013 where my friends and I would play everything on the hardest difficulty (Veteran Mode in CoD for example) and try to get all of the achievements. I remember going and playing the open world online mode in Red Dead Redemption, my friend and I were trying to get a achievement called Most Wanted (stay alive for 10 mins as the public enemy and get away). When you became the public enemy, everyone in this open world lobby would know. I had people come and kill my friend (who tried to defend me) and I before I could get this achievement. Six to Seven hours later, about 11 PM, I finally had a enough of this and quit. I never got the achievement and never cared about them again. That has made my gaming experience improve greatly.

Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?

One of the reasons I think Magic: The Gathering is the greatest game of all time is because you can do this constantly. Of course there is always the goal of "win the game", but the process of even attempting that can be broken down into so many component parts that you can derive a sense of fulfilment from succeeding in one bluff, or from feeling like you got "ahead" in some abstract way. I think this is one of the major things that offsets the bitterness of sometimes being on the wrong side of chance in any one individual game. And that is without even mentioning different formats that are specifically designed around somewhat different focuses and goals to the main ruleset.

At some point in gaming I shifted my goals in a big picture sort of way. I used to be a completionist, especially in grand RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, etc. I wanted to see everything the creators made, check out every nook and cranny in the world, recruit all of the characters; I wanted to get the "full experience." It was with Mass Effect 2 that changed my mind on how I play RPGs. I decided I was going to role play the role playing game. Seems obvious in retrospect, but I didn't sit down and preemptively make the choice; it just felt like the right move when I started the game.

To clarify my statement a bit, I was going to play Mass Effect as Shepard. He was tasked with an impossibly imposing task: save humanity from the Reapers. And so as a ranking official, I did my job. No, Miranda, I am not going to spend time going to settle your family squabbles. You came on knowing that I needed to save the universe, and it seems like a pretty urgent issue if I'm being honest. Strange ship sending an odd signal? Not my problem. Saving the universe. I didn't try to romance anybody either, because it would be unbecoming of an official and frankly my mind was preoccupied with saving the damn universe. Except for Jack.

The details to me are fuzzy at this point, but something pulled me towards Jack. Her story was compelling and her spending time in the basement of the Normandy made me feel sorry for her. So I rationalized taking the time to help her as a means to ease her unstable mind. What good is a soldier if they don't have the mental strength to deal with the harsh reality of war? Sure, the rest of my crew had stuff on their minds, but they were strong enough to deal with it. I felt like Jack could snap at any moment, and it would be a danger to me and my mission. So I spent a lot of time with Jack, and even ended up completing her sidequest. It turned her around emotionally, and suddenly the dismal war effort was re-invigorated and as I moved into the final mission, I felt good.

And then everybody started to die. As is known now, most of your party in Mass Effect 2 can die in the final mission of the game. It ultimately meant little in regards to the series finale, but at the time it was a dramatic choice to let all of these characters potentially parish based on your previous choices. I hadn't made personal bonds with most of them (to restate: I was too busy saving the damn universe to make friends.) but I did with Jack. When it came time to select a biotic to hold up a force field to protect the group, I went with Jack. After all, she was the more gifted biotic of the two choices I had, and she had put away her emotional demons for the time being. It was an obvious choice. Until she died too. It was crushing. Potentially the most emotionally crushing moment I've had in a video game. The only character I took time away from my job to learn more about has now been killed along with the rest of my crew. It was hard times, but it cemented my choice at the beginning of the game: to role play. It made my journey through Mass Effect that much more personal. While my friends were talking about saving all of their crew and the side quests they had completed, I was enjoying missing out on all that. It made the universe Bioware created that much more alive and personal to me, like the urgency of the main quest had the consequences it feels like they intended.

I would say that throughout my gaming experience, I've usually opted to lower the bar for myself in order to minimize frustration. This has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and the time I have to play has been cut down significantly. Now, I'm the first one to jump down a difficulty or enter a cheat code to get through a part of a level that's giving me trouble. Just recently, I was playing through the Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void campaign, and the epilogue missions were just destroying me. I decided after a few retries that I didn't care that much about getting the achievements, and just cheated my way to a massive, invincible army and destroyed the...uh...bad guys (no spoilers). It was fun to just run over the armies that had been previously wiping the floor with me, but I didn't get as many achievements after beating the game. Oh well.

It's interesting, then, that some of my favorite memories have been the times that I've done exactly the opposite and pushed myself to be better. The biggest example of doubling down that I’m reminded of occurred back in the aughts with a little game called DDR.

I found Dance Dance Revolution in high school, which for me was almost fifteen years ago now. I could probably write thousands and thousands of words about my experience with DDR and the community around it, but the cliff notes are this: I fell in love with the game from the moment I first stepped on a pad and played during a school choir trip to West Palm Beach. For some reason I just couldn't stop despite the fact that from the word “go” the game is a big hill to climb. Sure, the difficulty curve isn't nearly what other rhythm games are (I found IIDX later and hooo boy) but you look and feel like a total douche for a long time learning to play that game. I came home and immediately started doing some research. I bought a soft pad and downloaded some stepcharts for whatever simulation was around before Stepmania. After trying to do that for a bit, I found the nearest machine, and went to an arcade at the beach nearby that would eventually become a regular stomping ground, and a source of many lasting friendships.

The culture around that game is probably the reason I kept going even when I hit the same walls that used to force me to cheat or stop playing at home. I got a lot of encouragement and coaching from other players, so when I couldn't figure out how to do crossovers or runs or kept failing in a particular part of a song, people would be there to show me how to execute a certain technique or think about a certain run of notes. They were the reason I changed my attitude towards the game, instead of just playing the same couple of songs that I knew were fun and easy and instead pushed myself towards the things that I thought I could never do. The feeling that came from finally nailing a song that had previously defeated me over and over.... there's nothing like it. I'll never forget the moment I finally destroyed one of my biggest walls in that game: Dead End Expert. I stepped off the pad and fell onto the floor, panting and covered in sweat. Passing that song took absolutely everything I had, but it was one of the most purely joyful moments of my life. Not just because I had overcome a difficult level, but because I was surrounded by people who knew exactly what it had taken for me to do so.

Part of what that involved was the thing this week’s Off the Clock is about: changing my approach. Sure, there are a lot of technical things that you learn over the course of climbing the difficulty ladder in DDR: from keeping your feet on the arrows to the aforementioned crossovers, even just being able to read the arrows at different speeds. All of those things had a huge impact on how I played the game, for sure, but the real difference was a mental one: accepting failure and pushing forward. In DDR, I found that the only way to get any better is to push yourself beyond your current abilities, and that involves a lot of failure. Learning to accept that failure as part of the process instead of being frustrated by it was something that served me not only in DDR and videogames in general, but in life.

Check out Arkham Investigator for a Lovecraftian take Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. It's free to download (print & play) and there is also a full board game of it coming out in 2016.

I played the FMV version of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and quite loved it. Her Story did scratch that same itch for me.

There was also a semi-recently released board game called Witness that did something similar to the Sherlock Holmes game. It was based on a Belgian comic called Blake & Mortimer It was featured on http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/. (Haven't played it myself though)

A friend of mine bought me a copy of SH: CD for my birthday this year after we've been talking about it for years, we were not disappointed. The game is great, but very complex and difficult at times. We've only gotten a few cases out of the way but I'm eager to get to the rest. I'm glad it's seemingly not hundreds of dollars anymore. At least I hope he didn't spend that much on me.

Thanks for this. I have been wanting to try SH for a long time. One thing I had always heard that kind of put me off of the game was that it was really hard to "win". Reading this really helped me understand that you can still focus on solving the mystery and feel like you have accomplished something. Really enjoy reading your stuff. Thanks again.

Are you sure that's a cat. Looks more like a mountain lion.

I've played just the 2nd case of SH:CD having missed the 1st case playthrough that my friends made. They had learnt a load from their first case and it amazing fun because they'd bought a whole load of stationery specifically to aid in notetaking and theory notation. We had basically a whiteboard stuck up on the wall with one person creating a timeline; another, a list of the characters we met with all their details; another detailing all the objects of interest; one person marking points of interest on the map with small post-its; somone else had the specific job of looking through the directory and the newspapers; oh and one person reading out the text from the leads with accents/voices wherever possible. It was awesome! It only added to the experience by getting into it that much. (Plus I added a 19th century music soundtrack although the added victorian street sounds soundtrack I put on loop was sadly vetoed for being distracting). We actually got the correct answer for the 2nd main case after maybe following just 11 leads. I felt like we were being very efficient though I wouldn't have come up with all the right ideas myself - we definitely needed to bounce ideas around. We did completely miss meeting one of the side characters but that was fine. I agree that you should just play until you're satisfied. I really liked that freedom that was implicit in how to go about playing Her Story.

I think I know which clue you spotted in the first newspapar for that 2nd case, that was relevant. That was a particular highpoint of fun revelation.

Nice article, Austin.