Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey folks it is that time again, time for the Games of the Year show. As is often the case we ended up with way too many things to talk about and could in no way fit them into a single show. As a result this week I bring you the continuation of last week’s show as we run through the second batch of games. We covered twelve games in the first show and we cover the last seven games in this show. As you can tell when we go further into the list more active discussion happens as there is a bit more overlap in the titles.
Without further waffling, I bring you the second round of discussion.
It has been interesting to see how getting the Xbox Series X has changed my gameplay habits in a way that the PlayStation 5 has not yet. In part some of it is the fact that I set it up in the living room and after a few years of working from home, I feel the need to escape my office each evening. Another part is Microsoft Game Pass. I am not sure if you can fully explain how liberating it is, to be able to just download any game that I might even having a passing interest in and be up and running in very short order. The thing about Forza Horizon 5, is that I never would have purchased this game on my own. The irony of that statement is that there is a version of me from the past that used to love driving games. I played a ton of Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer on the PlayStation and even gravitated towards the Crusin series and Daytona in the arcades. However as a modern gamer… I never really spent time playing racing games because it felt like they doubled down on the simulation aspect whereas I was more interested in big dumb arcade fun.
For awhile now folks had told me that the Horizon series from Forza was their version of big dumb arcade fun, and after spending some time with it I would agree. Sure there is some simulation there, but you can also mostly turn it off by lowering the difficulty. This is a fact that I forgot when I briefly got excited about winning. However while we are on this screen I want to share my biggest complaint about the game. There are no beard options… what the fuck is up with that? I give them props for having the ability to include various prosthetic limbs, but I do get annoyed by this babyfaced schmuck every time I get out of the car. Apparently I am not alone in this notion with reddit threads offering to start a GoFundMe to get Microsoft to add beards.
I will say one thing that almost makes up for it however… is that while you are limited in the names that you choose for yourself, they are all voice acted. There are a whole slew of common names you can choose, but I noticed with Horizon 5 you can also add a list of “nicknames”. Among these is “Bell” which while I don’t put two Ls in my spelling… it sounds the same, which means every time I do anything in game I get called by my chosen online moniker. Honestly… I would probably rather have this than beards given how little time I actually spend out of the car. I’ve never really gotten to experience this in a video game and I think it is exceptionally cool.
One of the weird things that this game does when you are doing solo races… is it populates all of the other drivers from your friends list. At first when I saw this screen I was getting all excited that I bested Nimgimli in the race, until I had a slight realization. I thought it was showing me the record times of all of my friends and that I had beaten them all. Instead I realized it was just showing me winning against a bunch of low level bots that happened to be named the same as my friends. Granted racing actual friends is a thing that can be done in this game and at some point it might be worth trying. I still would rather race against a bunch of names I recognize than completely random bots, so I guess it is still neat.
The other time that I have spent some time doing is customizing my vehicles with new paint jobs and wraps. I thought it was really cool that there is a whole community driven thing where folks can upload their favorite skins and the community can vote on them. If I was going to have a Jeep Wrangler hard top… and a Jurrasic Park skin was available… there is no way I was not using it. They had some skins that were more true to the movie, but I personally liked the one the best. If I get a Ford Explorer I will have to see if they have that skin as well.
My favorite vehicle so far is the 2021 Ford Bronco that you get as part of the initial allotment of vehicles. I would love to own one of these in real life, and I greatly prefer driving a more off-road friendly vehicle in this sort of game. I am having a freaking blast with this game, and again this is not a title that I ever would have purchased on my own. I used to love driving games and this has rekindled that in me. It makes me wonder about exploring some of the other genres that I used to love but mostly abandoned when I got so heavily into MMORPGs. In line with this… I have been playing a ton of Lumines on the Xbox as well and I downloaded Tetris Effect and Bejeweled 3 which were also on Game Pass. There are rumors that Sony is working on their own Game Pass like service and I legitimately hope they make good on that concept. For now however… for the sheer aspect of getting to try out a lot of different things… Game Pass is a phenomenal deal.
Good Morning Friends. This has been a bit of a weird week and I am not feeling super awesome. I am uncertain if I actually talked about it on the blog but I did something very stupid last week and ended up with several second degree burns. Thankfully however at this point they have all healed minus one spot on my forefinger. As far as gaming goes I have been alternating between wrapping up my play-through of Witcher 3 on the PC and playing the Xbox Series X. I am getting close to the end of the main campaign and am hoping I am on the right track for a very specific ending. In theory tonight or Saturday I should finish this up.
Apart from that I am spending quite a bit of time dinking around with Forza Horizon 5. I am not sure why the game is bringing me so much joy, especially since I seem to spend most of my time just driving around aimlessly. I’m installing it on my PC just to test a theory… but I am guessing I share everything between my XSX play sessions and PC play sessions. I have a handful of vehicles that I really enjoy, and managed to pull an orange rarity vehicle that allows me to fully customize the paint job. So I have this slick car with a two tone paint job that is purple fading to navy. Unfortunately I have been caught up in the moment and been forgetting to press the share button so you get this screenshot again.
This weekend Dad of War arrives on the PC, and I am probably going to be spending quite a bit of time playing that. I have it on the PlayStation but I remember playing it initially and thinking… that I really wish I could play it with a keyboard and mouse. We will see if it magically makes everything better for me, but regardless it is a game that I would love to play through fully. Forza has become my quick drop in and drop out game when I need a break from whatever epic saga I happen to be working on.
Apart from that I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning. I hope you are having a great week and end up having a phenomenal weekend.
This morning’s post is going to be a little different from my usual fare. I’ve shared a bunch of details about my life over the course of the almost thirteen years of this blog. One that I am certain I have talked about before is the fact that in High School I worked for Sports Card and Comic shop owned by a friend of mine. The store was founded in 1989 which is a fortuitous year when it comes to sports card collecting, because in 1989 the Upper Deck Company released it’s very first trading card set and ultimately changed the entire industry. Over the course of the next few years until the crash began in 1992 we saw the average price of a pack of cards go from around $0.50 to around $3 as manufacturers stumbled over themselves to create newer and flashier sets to attract what seemed like a bottomless market of collectors.
If you are curious about this era you can check out this excellent article, but effectively two things happened. The first was extremely high print runs to attempt to meet the ravenous demand of all of these new “collectors”. The second thing was the fact that said demand was not legitimate. Most of this massive increase of collecting was brought on by speculators and those who got caught up in the wave of hype. For awhile baseball cards were considered to be a better investment than gold, and the crowd wisdom spawned countless weekend card shows where mom and pop stores like the one I worked at sold and traded huge volumes of cards. My weekends during this era were spent going to roadside ramadas and camping out a makeshift tradeshow floors looking for anything that could be bought cheaply or vendors that we could flip our own merchandise to.
When the market began crashing in sports card, so many people pivoted to another market that had been long overlooked… comic books. We were in the middle of some events happening in comics that were somewhat unique as well. We were well in the “hero artist” era of comics, where big name artists sold books more than the stories or characters that were in them. In late 1991 Tod McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio broke away from Marvel Comics to form their own imprint Image Comics. On February 1st a press release was sent out announcing the formation of the group and then follows a sequence of first issues that caused panic and frenzy in comic collectors.
Youngblood #1 – April 1992
Spawn #1 – May 1992
Shadowhawk #1 – June 1992
Savage Dragon #1 – July 1992
Wildcats #1 – August 1992
Cyber Force #1 – October 1992
Since our sports card business was failing… the shop pivoted hard along with the rest of the collectables market into comic books. Everything became valuable and rare from the insanely sought after Valiant comic first issues to a whole slew of gorgeous books from Dark Horse. What followed however was the same nonsense that happened in sports cards as Marvel, DC, and a slew of smaller imprints fought to capture the same sort of attention these first few Image books did. Before long we were in the era of Diamond Distributors touting another must buy #1 issue every single month and with it the nonsense of multiple chase covers and limited edition lenticular chroma plated covers. By 1993 this spectacle was in free fall brought on by the overwhelming nonsense surrounding the Death of Superman. If you want more detail then check out something like this article that talks a bit more about the crash.
Speculative bubbles are always going to be a thing. For years I have felt like we were on the edge of bursting in Magic the Gathering. This card is Wheel of Fortune, which is both an iconic card… but also one that held little value for a really long time. Specifically I am looking here at the Revised edition of the card… which is a truly massive print run as far as magic cards go. This card has seen its prices go from around $8 in 2013 to now selling for upwards of $300. I point this card out specifically because it has been the subject of several targeted buyouts attempting to raise the price of the card by lowering the available supply on the market. The thing is… it has worked and now what used to be a card I didn’t even bother sleeving is now goes in the “most valuable” storage of my collection.
We are now finally getting to the subject of today’s blog post. We are currently living through a bubble in video games that potentially out scales all of the bubbles I have talked about to this point. I was firmly a child of the 90s era consoles and as a result when I got my first job and started making legitimate money… I begin snapping up all of those consoles that I used to dream about owning. I mean as a kid I was lucky because I had a NES, Gameboy, SNES and eventually a Genesis. However I lusted after all of those fringe consoles that I never had access to and through short succession in the early 2000s I snapped most of them up in those early heady days of Ebay and Yahoo Auctions. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and now most of those systems that I snapped up for a few bucks here and there at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions are priced well out of the reach of folks. My complete Atari Jaguar for example that I think I paid $50-70 for initially now goes for somewhere in the neighborhood of $600.
The height of this nonsense though can be most clearly seen in the prices of loose copies of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember not too terribly long ago you could pick up a refurbished NES for $15 and almost always got a free copy of the original Super Mario Bros thrown in along with it. Now that raw loose copy itself goes for upwards of $20 and you can see on the graph above its rise in price really spiked in 2017. For me at least I collected games because I wanted to play them and get to experience the things that I never did as a child. As a result I ultimately realized that I am perfectly happy playing the games emulated as opposed to having to own a physical copy. However there is a whole other breed of collector that is seeking out the most complete copies of the games they can get their hands on.
Along with these genuine collectors seeking to rebuy chunks of their childhood or the nostalgia of walking through Toys R Us during the heyday of the late 80s, have come the speculators. There is a burgeoning business in trying to flip games for profit. What has added gasoline to this fire is that the lockdowns and the general shit state of the world right now has seemingly spurred on this massive desire to recapture a part of simpler times. Amazon and Ebay as a result have become a hotbed of folks looking to source games cheaply and sell them for ever increasing profits. There are many YouTube channels devoted to this reseller lifestyle of showing folks going out into the “wild” and getting good deals and then flipping them for double the money. The problem is I don’t think any of this is sustainable and I question what permanent damage is going to be wrought when this market crashes like was ultimately done to the sports card and comic markets.
The most disturbing thing about this particular bubble however is that it is being seemingly artificially propped up by a questionable relationship between a grading company and a private auction site. I can’t really do it justice but there are several sources that have reported on the alleged connections between Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and a number of shill bidders that have artificially inflated the price of graded games going up for Auction. The end result is we seem to be in this landrun of folks looking to get rich quick by flipping their old video games and feeling like they have a goldmine. I had noticed a bit of this myself as through my frequent trips to Half Priced Books… I noticed the $5 games turning into $15 games and more recently turning into $50 games. Retro gaming right now is a truly unsustainable mess and as a result I find myself sitting here waiting on the other shoe to drop.
I leave this last image as another cautionary tale. No one really wants video game collecting to be the next Beanie Babies. I will say one of the nice side effects of this bubble however has been an increased interest in emulation and with it better devices coming out to market. Similarly there are also way more affordable flash carts allowing you to easily play roms on the original hardware. Effectively these are all more viable solutions in part because the price of games is such that even if you do own the original game… it feels like you are risking your investment if you actually play it. We live in interesting times.
