I have a fairly unique taste in video games, I think. Not in a tooting-my-own-horn kind of way (maybe a little, though), but sometimes people do look at a game I'm playing and ask how or why or sometimes even what the fuck, and sometimes more crucially, I'll look at a game someone is dismissing and think "that looks alright". Part of it because of growing up with certain kinds of games due to necessity--being poor means I relied a lot on emulators, cheap games and Shareware collections from dollar stores like Dollar General or quite literally The Dollar Store, and previous game generations becoming more affordable as the current generation carried on. This resulted in me learning a few video game related skills, such as
- Meeting games where they are
- Finding the fun where fun might not be
- Learning to enjoy a challenging control scheme
- Seeing what the designers intended not matching what they were able to make, but enjoying it anyway
This eventually coalesced into a realization--Jank Is The Soul Of Video Games. I built up a tolerance for it. Sometimes I'll seemingly drag myself all the way through a video game I'm constantly complaining about, and say "that was fun!" and then recommend it.
I don't think it's bad or some kind of personal failing to look at a janky or bad or rough video game and declare it bad and walk away, to be clear! I am absolutely not saying anyone who does is bad or wrong, not in the least.
Soon enough sometime I'll go into more detail on some of these. But I do think this is why I enjoy the variety of games I do. Retro games, retro-inspired games, janky 3D, games that are broad rather than deep, ultimately ending at trends that stopped in the 360 era, which is where I think that using those bulletpoints its zenith for a bit--and then promptly died with the discovery of battle passes and lootboxes and gacha in lieu of the design choices that require those bulletpoints.