Ronzilla Asks RPS
Cor, has it really been almost half a year since we’ve done one of these? Apologies, readers. I honestly don’t know where the time goes. It’s probably because we’re spending too much time with our favourite guilty pleasure games, which is the subject of this latestAsk RPScolumn.
James:Yeah, tough one. I feel guilty about how excessively competitive I became playingApex Legends, but not for playing the game per se. I think the closest I’ve come to this was maybeAtomic Heart, earlier this year? Its frequent lapses into terribleness (hateful characters, baffling world design, questionable politics) definitely made me quieten down to others about how fun I was having with the moment-to-moment robot blasting.
Katharine:I think the best answer I have for this is: any Assassin’s Creed game. I have logged stupid numbers of hours playing bothOdysseyandValhallaover the last five years, and I honestly don’t know why I kept playing them for so long. They are entirely hollow video games, with rinse-repeat tasks, the same kind of nothing castle raiding and auto-climbing parkour, andyet. Even though I know they’re trash, they’re also thebest kindof trash. I don’t care one jot for the wider AC lore hole. I don’t really even consider myself a “fan” of the series. But will I keep playing the heck out of them withevery subsequent release? Hoo boy, absolutely yes I will.
Alice Bee:I don’t consider any of my pleasures that guilty to be honest! At least not in the sense that I’m embarrassed to admit I play it. I mean I don’t play any anime girl sex games, I suppose, and if I did maybe my feelings re: shame would be different. But in general I think if something makes you happy and it’s not hurting your or others then why feel guilty? I do have a Picross game on my phone that I loghoursin, almost every day. It’s called CrossMe and every so often it updates with new puzzles, and a lot of the images are of dubious origin. I did one puzzle the other day that was theSkyrimlogo and it was called ‘Dragon Picture’ or something. So I get guilty about that in the sense that I use it like a fidget spinner, essentially, but the cumulative time spent playing it could be more profitably spent on e.g. reading a book. Genuinely my most played game of basically any year.
Alice0:Like Alice, I don’t believe in having “guilty pleasures”. I will openly and joyously admit to everything I play, read, watch, and listen to - especially the trash. To act like some games are beneath you is to intentionally ignore the full and sometimes terrible power of video games. There’s huge power in something which can satisfy a need or scratch an itch deep in you yet provoke a reaction of guilt or shame, and that’s worth giving real thought. So to go along with the spirit of the question, I will say that I recently needed to uninstallBrotatobecause it was becoming a genuine problem for my life.
